Earlier today The-Tea-Party-dot-Net hosted what they vigorously asserted to be an "historic" event: the first presidential primary debate conducted via Twitter. Mind you, I was initially skeptical, but I was very, very wrong. We may have found the perfect media for conservative candidates to really shine in. Dear candidates: please solve each of America's problems in one short sentence. Oh, and there will be no follow-ups.
Not every candidate chose to take advantage of this historic challenge to be as vapid as possible in the public square. Which is too bad, because really, I think there may be no better way to judge a person's readiness to lead the free world than this.
There were epic bon mots:
Inexplicable use of hash tags:
Puffery bordering on self-delusion:
And, alas, candidates who were just too long winded for their own good:
Yeah, sorry pal. Too long; didn't read.
More candidate wisdom below the fold:
If the debate could be summed up in one theme, it would be that business needs its freedom. Candidates battled valiantly to make sure everybody knew that if elected president, they would be unparallelled in their ability to suck up to big business:
You'd think that in a format that allowed only a 140-character answers, candidates would finally have a forum in which they would not be reduced to simply repeating themselves: you would be wrong.
You might also think that in a forum where a candidate was asked to say so little, coming up with enough material to fill out twenty or so little tweets would not present much difficulty. One candidate in particular, however, seemed to run out of things to say early on, instead merely repeating variations of the same few talking points:
You have to be remarkably obtuse if
Twitter taxes your ability to think up original thoughts, but I suppose we should not judge too harshly. It is, after all, possible that this is the wave of the future, and alongside such great political speeches as the Gettysburg address, or such memorable wisdom as
ask not what your country can do for you, we shall also include tweets such as these in the pantheon of great American thoughts:
Now that's some bold thinking there.
If all this is too much for you, cheer up: even as we speak, the networks are working with political scientists to create even terser, even more vapid candidate forums. Fox News is hoping to present the next primary debate entirely by haiku; by 2016 we hope to have perfected primary debates via fortune cookie; by 2020, all candidates will be required to submit their policy platforms in the form of a vanity license plate. When it comes to dumbing down the political debate, we have not yet begun to tweet.