Despite her own descriptions of her job, officials from Senate candidate Ben Cardin?s campaign insisted the woman fired for posting racial comments on an anonymous blog played a minimal role to his staff.
Cardin said he fired the employee Friday immediately after learning about the comments on her blog.
Under the pseudonym “Persuasionatrix,” the author also wrote that she feels like a “sex object” for Cardin?s friends, who she describes as “old, Jewish men” and “large men with strong, loud voices and Jewish noses.”
“I am deeply offended and disgusted by the blog?s racial and anti-Semitic overtones,” Cardin said in a prepared statement. “The staff member responsible was promptly dismissed and will have nothing to do with this campaign.”
Cardin spokesman Oren Shur said the author was a junior field staffer who worked on the campaign for about one month. He declined to confirm her name, which is being circulated on other blog sites.
In earlier postings, the blogger wrote she began working in Cardin?s campaign headquarters as a senior staffer Aug. 3 and implied she directed a regional network of county campaign organizers who managed assistants who had their own interns.
“I show up and everyone listens,” the woman wrote. “I don?t have to do the majority of the grunt work or obnoxious calls.”
Cardin, who is white and Jewish, will face Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, in November?s general election. In her blog, the staffer wrote about “devouring the competition” with Oreo cookies, a reference to a 2002 incident when the cookies were hurled at Steele during a debate.
The cookies were meant as an attack on Steele?s racial loyalty. His campaign denounced the postings over the weekend.
“It is deeply disturbing to learn this was from a senior staffer on the campaign,” Steele campaign spokeswoman Melissa Sellers wrote. “Marylanders are sick of this consistent pattern of gutter politics and racial attacks, and they will vote for change in November.”
