Our political Quote of the Day comes from The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro on the current mood in the Republican Party:
As write-in queen Lisa Murkowski can testify, social media can be serve as a powerful tool for organizing brigades of pencil-pushing voters willing to make electoral history.
Of course, the current none-of-the-above mood among many Republican loyalists could simply be viewed as a vote of no-confidence in the bizarre way that we choose presidential nominees (eight months devoted to wooing 120,000 Iowa GOP caucus-goers). It is as if the Republicans finally grasp the Catch-22 of contemporary campaigning: Anyone who runs for president in an era of cell-phone cameras and Tweet-deck reporters is too crazy ever to be allowed control over nuclear weapons.
And, indeed, the tool is out there — a tool perhaps out there too much in the case of Democrat Anthony Weiner who has given a new meaning to the word “crotchety.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.