Tweet Police: Ohio GOP Says Obama and Brown Playing “Hide and Seek”, or Something Like That

• Words — kind of important, politically speaking.

Even though it’s on Twitter, it still has to make sense.

Now that we’re in the sweet spot of the political season, both parties have rolled up their sleeves for the usual rhetorical fisticuffs. A kind of lower life form on this stage of battle is the lobs both sides toss from their perches on Twitter. Unfortunately, edging in on November, the web likely will be cluttered with this kind of abridged political talk, which means we’ll probably end up with more head-scratching gaffes like this one.

As you probably know, President Obama is in Cleveland today to give a speech on economic development. The Ohio Republicans are cuing up interference, and that includes tweeting out the not so subtle suggestion that other Ohio Dems up for re-election are keeping POTUS at arms length — or at least that seems to be what they’re trying to say here.

Last night, @ohiogop, the official Twitter mouthpiece of the Ohio Republican Party, shot out the above. The link leads to a piece from The Hill about how today Senator Sherrod Brown won’t appear with the president. The Democrats say it’s a scheduling issue; The Hill suggests it might mean Obama is still anathema in Ohio and Brown is staying back. And hey, considering Obama’s tenuous popularity and Brown’s strong challenger Josh Mandel, that’s a fair point. Our issue is with the tweet itself, which doesn’t so much resemble an idea as a 140-character alter on which someone’s slaughtered common sense, metaphor, and the basics of the English sentence for the sake of a political jab.

This article appears in Dec 28, 2011 – Jan 3, 2012.