SUBJECT: Twitter is not your friend. No doubt any number of your colleagues have urged you to begin Twittering — sending your thoughts on life, the universe and everything out to the world in bite-sized, 140-character chunks.

Don’t do it.

Twitter may be all the rage for athletes, Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and even the Fix, but it is a bad, bad idea for politicians. Why?

To with: Less than 24 hours after President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) tweeted — to the nearly 400,000 people who follow him on Twitter — the following proclamation: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

Those 95 characters (he still had 45 in reserve!) kicked off a furor that led Gingrich to acknowledge last week that his “initial reaction was strong and direct — perhaps too strong and direct.” Oopsie!

An isolated incident amid a sea of tweets, you say? We have two words for you: Mark Shurtleff.

Shurtleff, the Republican attorney general in Utah, had been for months publicly mulling the possibility of challenging Sen. Bob Bennett in 2010.

Thinking he was sending a text message to a friend last month, Shurtleff tweeted this to his 2,329 closest Twitter friends: “I’m announcing I’m running at 12 . . . all of the legislative conservative caucus and other senators representatives there endorsing me . . . time to rock and roll!” Seven minutes later, Shurtleff realized his mistake and tweeted (hair of the dog, we suppose) that he was removing the previous post.

According to the David All Group there are now 126 Congressmen and Senators using Twitter and The Hill newspaper devotes an entire section of its website to waht politicans and pundits say on Twitter. 

Twitter may be a useful tool to communicate their opinions but politicians need to do something that they aren’t very good at, think first then speak.

Post #2102