Backing Barack
The Politico reporter’s tweets also carried plainspoken approval of the president he covered in the White House, and an advocate’s positive spin on his re-election effort. (RELATED: TheDC’s complete coverage of Williamsgate)
Among the final stories Williams wrote for Politico was a May 9 analysis of African-American voters’ views on gay marriage. The article appeared online the same day President Obama announced his support for gay and lesbian couples who want to marry.
“[H]ow do you think it’ll play out in Nov. if he full-out supports it?” one reader asked via Twitter.
“I think it’s all good,” Williams tweeted back, “gays, youth energized; campaign now has a buzz it didn’t before; Mitt [Romney] looks flatter.”
Three minutes later, he expanded his Obama-friendly assessment: “[H]ope & change have returned.” The “downside,” he said, would be that “pple [people] who hate POTUS [the president] will continue; cons [conservatives] may B[e] fired up, but were already.”
So the president’s gay marriage decision, he wrote, was a “net pos [positive].”
Williams went further on June 5, lapsing into the first person to identify himself directly with the Democratic Party and the president’s re-election effort.
After Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survived a union labor-driven recall effort that day, fellow Politico reporter Byron Tau tweeted a White House statement that ”a race where one side is outspending the other by a ratio of at least 8 to 1 probably won’t tell us much about a future race.”
“[E]xcept that we need more money,” Williams shot back in a tweet.
Hitting Mitt
Williams’s Twitter history also shows him regularly egging on left-leaning reporters and liberal commentators, and treating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s candidate-in-waiting to replace Barack Obama, like a political punching bag.
At the February 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Romney had made headlines on February 10 by insisting that he was “a severely conservative Republican governor” in Massachusetts.
Molly Ball, a politics writer at The Atlantic, quipped on Twitter, “Was it curable?? #cpac.” Williams responded that it was, but “only b/c [because] he had single payer” health insurance.
Mother Jones magazine Washington editor and MSNBC contributor David Corn provided another softball setup for Williams after Romney won the March 20 Illinois Republican primary. “Are you ready to Romney???!!!!!” Corn tweeted, mocking his acceptance speech.
Four hours later, Williams retweeted the message, adding his own snark in the form of rap lyrics. “[T]hrow your hands in the air,” he wrote. “[W]ave ‘em like you just don’t care about the underclass.”
Hours later, on March 21, he retweeted essayist Chris Dashiell’s comment that Romney’s “most important selling point won’t change. He’s white.” Williams added that the Republican is also “not a socialist Muslim atheist coming for your guns.”
In some cases, public comments by Romney’s supporters and neutral analysts became fodder for Williams.
Hours after a February 22 GOP presidential primary debate concluded in Arizona, University of Virginia political prognosticator Larry Sabato tweeted his approval of Romney’s performance. “Mit [sic] has the right talking points, studied up, wins forensics contest,” he wrote. “But viewers never see his core, his persona.”
“[I]is there one?” Williams replied.
In another tweet first reported by Breitbart.com, Williams responded to an observation by Romney’s wife Ann, who said his political handlers should “unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out” so Americans could see his humorous side.
“Either Ann Romney meant Mitt is flaccid or that when we ‘unzip him’ we’ll find he’s a d–k,” Williams tweeted.
