Booker Nabs a Shorty, and Good for Him
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, March 5 2010
(Apologies for the non-existent blogging earlier today. Some severe laptop troubles -- though she seems to be feeling better now.)
Credit: trisOkay, so who would win in a fight between NASA, the Virginia State Parks, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker? If it's a Twitter battle, then it has to be Booker, the winner last night of the Shorty Award in the category of government. (If it was a fight-fight, Booker'd probably come to compete, and the parks would have a size advantage, but we'd have to go with NASA because of their rockets and stuff.)
We kid, and a Shorty Award isn't actually the height of public achievements, but the thing about Booker is that he's used Twitter (and his 1,075,937 followers on the platform as of this afternoon) to advance a unique brand of government, or public official. Booker is engaged, human, willing to bring a shovel to someone's driveway after they complain about the snowfall, and he has a habit of quoting spiritual leaders in his tweets. Not to be crass about it, because Booker seems committed to revitalizing Newark, but there are worse ways for someone like Booker to develop a political platform beyond their immediate political circumstances. It's hard to tweet as much as Booker does and keep up a fake persona, and as those of us who live in the great and insane state of New York can attest this week in particular, it potentially of benefit to voters and good politicians alike for us to really know, in advance, what the measure is of those that we chose to elect to office.
A fun thought experiment this Friday afternoon: are there are folks in American history who were tremendous political leaders, but would have made bad Twitterers? Or would we have known their greatness from their tweets? One's thing for sure -- it would have been awesome to hear from @AbeLincoln.