Blake Rutherford has an absolutely fantastic post regarding the following tweet by Patrick Kennedy:
The arc of a career politician is long and bends towards corruption. PK
- wasn’t afraid to admit when he did something wrong.”
- acted wrongfully to preserve his power in office.”
- In the end, a person’s “arc” is his or her own decision.
- What Kennedy is talking about (according to him) is “courage” and “leadership.”
- Joyce Elliott has been a courageous leader while in office, and she has answered tough questions, but she hasn’t put her “national platform” on the internet which is “where the common voter goes for information.”
So…if we synthesize all of the above (including the Twitter message that prompted Blake’s post), we get
The arc of someone who makes corrupt choices while in office is long and bends towards corruption. This long arc does not depend on the actual length of time in office, nor does the “corrupt” label apply if one apologizes when he errs and lets his “conscious” [sic] lead the way. Finally, courageous leaders may display courage and leadership, but that doesn’t mean a lot if they don’t also put big-picture ideas on the internet.
I guess Twitter’s 140-character limit forced Kennedy to truncate these insights.
Snark aside, two other points I will make about Kennedy’s tweet and explanation:
1. The tweet was posted at 12:41 AM. While Blake picked up on it, in general this is the type of random social media posting that drives me insane. I keep screaming about the need for coherent social media strategy; one aspect of that strategy has to be posting your content/messages at times when people are likely to actually SEE them.
2. The point about the internet being “where the common voter goes for information” is odd when you are talking about a state that ranks 48th in percentage of households with internet access.
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