Victor Wong looks at some well-intended-but-bad advice offered to prospective Conservative candidates:
There are times when I wonder if, out of some misplaced maternal instinct, we’re teaching the next generation of politicians to be cowards.
Don’t know quite what I mean? Have a look at this story in this week’s Hill Times:
” ‘At least one of you is going to get disqualified for something you put on Twitter or on Facebook. I don’t know which one of you it’s going to be but it will be at least one of you,’ ” Jenni Byrne, director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office, told a group of candidates last week, according to a Conservative source.
The problem with this sort of statement is that it gives your prospective Tory candidate the impression of only two options: either pull out of things like Facebook or Twitter altogether (which cuts you out of at least 20 percent of the potential voting audience) or get your site vetted by Tory higher-ups (which, inevitably, leads to “cookie-cutter” sites, which would make your national campaign happy (so free of controversy!) but which make you look like a mindless clone.
Of course, from the point of view of the PMO, a pack of mindless clones is exactly what they want. Trained seals are so last-century.
