A debate Tuesday night in Nebraska for the Republican primary for Senate took a turn for the awkward when state Attorney General Jon Bruning accused his main opponent, former state Attorney General Don Stenberg, of stalking Bruning’s 14-year old daughter on Twitter.
The Omaha World-Herald was there for the action.
Bruning said that this past weekend, his daughter told him Stenberg tried to follow her. “Now you tell me — I’d like to know, why does a 62-year-old man want to follow a 14-year-old girl on Twitter. I’d really like to know. She said, ‘Dad, that’s kind of creepy.'”
A decidedly flustered Stenberg said that he does not manage the campaign’s Twitter account himself, but that it is done by his campaign.
Bruning dug in further: “You tried to follow her on Twitter, Don. That’s kind of weird.”
Stenberg then named an aide from his campaign, Dan Parson, as the one responsible for managing his Twitter account.
“Well, quite honestly, I don’t do my own Twitter. Dan Parsons does it for me,” said Stenberg. “And, uh, we’ve got thousands and thousands of folks. And as soon as we get done here, I’m gonna call Dan and make sure that that’s taken off. I don’t think it’s appropriate, and I don’t know if Dan even knew who he was communicating with. I don’t know what the name was.”
Bruning, however, continued with his best Chris Hansen impression: “Well, she’s 14, Don.”
Parsons himself then told the paper that he does not remember ever putting in a request to follow Bruning’s daughter’s Twitter account, which is not publicly accessible. He did allow for the possibility, though, that it might have happened “inadvertently.”
“We use several search engines to follow people, and we follow thousands,” said Parsons.
In fairness to Parsons, it is possible to imagine such a scenario, once a person actually understands how Twitter works. For example, if a publicly accessible account belonging to one of the younger Bruning’s friends were to have copied and retweeted something she said about the Senate campaign, such a tweet could indeed have gotten flagged by a search engine.
