As a reporter covering the GOP presidential campaign, I follow all of the candidates’ Twitter feeds as a matter of course. Their tweets are usually about as interesting as you would assume. But on the plus side, I was one of the first 2,415 people to know what Buddy Roemer thought about Gary Johnson’s recitation of his friend’s text message conveying Rush Limbaugh’s joke about President Obama’s stimulus package.
But when I tried to follow Texas Gov. Rick Perry, I hit a dead-end: Apparently, Perry has blocked me from following his tweets:
I can still read his tweets if I go to his Twitter page—”The Iowa countryside is incredibly green,” he observantly mused recently—but they don’t show up in my feed. As far as transparency violations go, this is pretty small potatoes; it pales in comparison to deleting all of your official emails after seven days, which is the Perry administration’s official policy. (Perry, for his part, calls transparency “boring.”) But as it turns out, I’m not alone. Perry has blocked a bunch of reporters and bloggers, including some from Texas papers like the Dallas Morning-News. In response to that paper’s inquiries, a Perry spokeswoman said: “[I]t is the governor’s personal account, so he manages it as he likes. He uses non-state resources.”
Perry’s scheme of blocking journalists is confusing not just because no other candidate does this, but because, as the Post‘s Alexandra Petri, put it:
All your account really says about you is that you really like Texas and enjoy the company of dogs. But if you are planning to post embarrassing personal revelations later that you don’t want the press to know about, maybe you should reread the Twitter manual, because this isn’t really the forum.
Yes, my coverage of the governor’s record in Texas hasn’t exactly been glowing. I previously reported on his slow response to systematic abuse at the Texas Youth Commission, his coziness with the private prison lobby, his shaky record on the death penalty, and the radical roots of his prayer rally in Houston, The Response. Most recently, I noted that his Florida straw poll co-chair believes that gay people are responsible for natural disasters. But here’s an entire post listing good things that Perry has done that progressive might actually like.
Making things all the more confusing, Perry, at one point, was following me:
Maybe Mitt Romney’s right—there really are two Rick Perrys.
