What's Up With Chuck Grassley's Twitter Feed? (2015)
We have this segment on our podcast, Reply All, called "Yes Yes No." The idea is simple: PJ and I (the hosts) are nerds about the arcana of the Internet, and our boss, Alex Blumberg, is not. So he occasionally comes to us with some tweet he saw, and asks us to explain it to him. This week, it wasn't just a tweet, but a series of tweets, that all originated with one man: Senator Chuck Grassley.
Chuck Grassley is a Republican from Iowa. He opposes Obamacare. He believes there should be a constitutional ban on flag burning. He has not missed a roll call in the Senate in over 20 years. And he has one of the craziest Twitter feeds I've ever seen.
There's so much to love about Grassley's tweets, it's hard to know where to begin. First of all, a lot of them are formatted like the one above — lots of capital letters, words crammed together without spaces to accommodate the 140 character limit. It's like someone trying to read a page from a book without taking a breath.
Most lawmakers' Twitter feeds are pretty antiseptic — carefully manicured, free from personality, and relentlessly, exhaustingly on-message. Very few of them even write their own tweets. Grassley's Twitter feed is a voice that is totally unique and definitely his own. It is refreshing and unvarnished, even if it is sometimes only barely comprehensible.
In addition to the impossibly dense politicking Grassley does on his Twitter feed, there are some strange, almost poetic tweets that weave little vignettes about his life. They are almost always dramatic.
Also, weirdly, a number of them are about deer.
Seriously, there are a ton of them about deer.
Of course, his most popular tweet ever is by far one of his most interesting and enigmatic.
(Grassley says he simply meant that the Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is a good place for ice cream.)
Grassley has recently been posting much more frequently to Instagram. And I get it, there's a better character limit there, and it also contains a photo op. But there is something so unvarnished and, honestly, really sweet about his tweets. He may not be that great at communicating on Twitter. He may not even really get the medium. But he is prolific, and he is unapologetic. And he has a few words for all you haters out there.
