Background: I have taken to following my Congresscritter/Toothache Carol Shea-Porter on Twitter. There's no doubt a certain amount of masochism involved there, but there's also a bit of fun in occasionally Speaking Truth To Power, like yesterday.
A number of her tweets follow a certain formula: (a) link to an article containing some morsel of left-wing Democrat outrage (pretty thick on the ground these days); (b) prepend the comment: "Republicans, speak up. Now!"
I don't know about you, but I find this remarkably petulant and tone-deaf. CSP is a "public servant". (If you don't believe that, just read her press releases.) Where does she get off making demands of her constituents? And not all her constituents, mind you: just a subset of them: Republicans.
It's especially mystifying in a practical-politics sense: consider CSP is only in office by capturing a bare plurality (44.2%) of votes, eking out a 1.9% win over a weak, ethics-challenged GOP opponent, Frank Guinta. Can she really afford this kind of strident hyper-partisanship?
So I attempted to squeeze all that into a tweet:
@TeamSheaPorter Did some PR guru suggest that tweeting imperious orders to GOPers would make your constituents like you better? Not working.
— Paul Sand (@punsalad) January 31, 2017
How's that? The 140-character limit is tough for me.