UT-Sen: Shurtleff Accidentally Launches Candidacy Against Bennett

For reasons that remain unclear to me, the GOP has rushed to embrace Twitter as the tool that will lead them out of the wilderness. (Maybe it's because it's a medium that not only doesn't require you to have thoughts that take up more than 140 characters, but that doesn't even allow them.) Nevertheless, over its short lifetime, the GOP's infatuation with Twitter seems to have produced more petard-hoistings and outright FAILs than it has victories for the GOP's twits:

• the time errant tweets scuttled a GOP plan to flip a Dem to take control of the Virginia Senate,
• House Intelligence ranking member Pete Hoekstra twittering away his positions in Iraq,
• Wayne Mosely's recent hilarious overselling of his campaign,
• Joe Barton's hubris over what he perceived as his takedown of Energy Secretary Steven Chu followed by his twittering away with catty remarks like a bored teenager during the SOTU, and
• somebody's decision to direct the entire #NY20 feed onto Jim Tedisco's website, Dem press releases and all.
Well, we have an incident that may beat all of those: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff accidentally announced his own candidacy for the GOP Senate nomination on his Twitter account, apparently thinking that he was just texting to an acquaintance instead. (His account has been scrubbed, but the memory lives on, hewn in the living rock of screen capture.) According to the Salt Lake Tribune:


"I'm announcing I'm running at 12," Shurtleff wrote in part of a series of garbled messages, called tweets on the digital networking system.
In another he said he would have "all of the legislative conservative causcus (sic) and other senators and representatives there endorsing me. Time to rock and roll!"

Shurtleff later amended his statement to say that he was still deciding, and would make a formal announcement regarding his plans on May 20.

http://www.swingstateproject.com/diary/4950/utsen-shurtleff-accidentally-launches-candidacy-against-bennett