Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has told his staff to lay off the anonymous negative campaigning a day after adviser Eric Fehrnstrom admitted to being behind a Twitter feed that attacked one of Brown’s potential reelection rivals.
“While it’s clear Eric was seeking to inject a little levity into politics on his own time, I wasn’t aware of what he was doing,” Brown told the Boston Globe in a statement. Brown said to the paper he’s “made clear to everyone on or associated with my team that this type of thing is not to happen again.”
Ferhnstrom refused to apologize for the incident, which Democrats and Senate candidate Alan Khazei tried to raise to the level of full-on scandal yesterday.
“Sometimes we take our politics too seriously and this was my way of lightening things up,” Ferhnstrom told the Globe. “As they say in politics, if you can’t stand the tweet, get out of the kitchen.”
In response, of course, this happened:
Today, he was the focus of a measure of revenge: Someone created a “crazyfehrnstrom” Twitter account and illustrated it with a headshot of former Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, topped with his famed crewcut.
And so the latest Twitter-created mini-scandal in politics appears to have come to an end.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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