Bob Kerrey's Facebook Page Does Not Look Like a Senate Candidate's
The report that former Sen. Bob Kerrey will run for Senate in Nebraska came as a surprise to lots of people -- to Nebraska Democrats, to the Democrat already in the race -- and maybe to Kerrey himself? Poor Chuck Hassebrook quit his job University of Nebraska regent to run for the seat, and now he can't get that job back, The Hill reports. "I don't think there'd be a lot of happy people," the Nebraska Democratic chairman of county chairs, Bud Pettigrew, told Politico. But you can kind of tell that Kerrey, who said he wasn't running earlier this month, changed his mind pretty quickly, because he hasn't bothered to clean up his Facebook page to make it look like a respectable politician's.
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I added Kerrey as a friend on Facebook in May 2006. He appears to use the social networking site about like the typical man of his generation -- not much at all (and he appears to have only minimal privacy settings). So there's a ton of weird stuff: People posting about aliens, people making what appear to be weird references to marijuana, people tagging him on birthday calendars and as a dinosaur.
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Kerrey, who was also governor of Nebraska and ran The New School, had reportedly decided not to run so his kids could stay in their New York schools. That all these strange Facebook items are still up indicates Kerrey likely still felt that way until very recently. (The comments on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, for example, are meticulously edited.) There are a couple posts about a "Parallel Universe News Channel" -- "THE END OF COSMO-CENTRISM THRU CONTACT WITH 7 COLLATERAL HUMAN RACES." There are a couple posts about Nebraska laws. There's a photo in which Kerrey is tagged as a big green T-rex. "Who has two thumbs and rocks the color green?" comments one Facebooker. "Bob Kerrey!" responds another. Another person wrote about the presidential race on Kerrey's wall: "'ROOT OF ALL EVIL? Not In MY Book!' ~Mitt Glomney, GOP Blunt Runner..."
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Even if Kerrey simply hasn't checked his Facebook in a long time, or is very, very liberal about what gets posted on it, the lack of scrutiny as to its contents, public or not, would seem to reveal that he's jumped into the race rather quickly, and without a tremendous amount of strategic forethought. He doesn't even have the new Timeline. Yet.
