Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Survival of the Twittest

Jonah Goldberg is all excited because he thinks that the Republicans are winning the Twitter war.

We are in the early stages of the 2012 campaign season, with a lot of battlespace preparation going on. In the skirmishing so far, one perhaps surprising media advantage has become clear: the right is clobbering the left on Twitter.

Maybe it’s because Twitter puts a premium on brevity and cleverness. I don’t know. But for some reason, it seems to be a natural medium for conservatives. We saw it when the Hilary Rosen interview (“Ann Romney never worked a day in her life”) prompted a Twitterstorm. We saw it again when #ObamaEatsDogs exploded, and when #Julia blew up in the White House’s face like an exploding cigar.

The reason the right excels at Twitter is because the limitation of 160 characters — misspellings and all — is the extent of their attention span and depth of thought.

#Fail.