New York, NY – Citizens, former Mayor Ed Koch is on Twitter.
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He doesn’t have many followers yet; at present, there are just a dozen souls subscribing to Koch’s tweets. But what the 105th mayor of New York lacks in audience he more than makes up for with an adorable Twitter style. He begins each message by addressing his audience as “citizens.”
As a salutation and form of address, this is delightfully quaint — particularly in a medium given to routine informatility and ugly abbreviations. Addressing his readers as “citizens” also has an air of lower-case “r” republican zeal about it, sort of the democratic equivalent of bringing “comrade” back into the lingua franca.
The former mayor seems to have embraced Twitter as a way to spread the message about New York Uprising, his non-partisan reform group out to end corruption in Albany. In its first splash, New York Uprising extracted pledges from all major gubernatorial candidates to support an independent redistricting commission and to veto any compromised redistricting plan. After the budget is passed, the group plans to seek similar pledges from Albany lawmakers. (The former mayor’s latest tweet seems to signal that the next phase is getting underway.)
Koch is not the only New York mayor to have embraced Twitter. But unlike New York’s current tweeting mayor — @mikebloomberg has been awfully quiet since his re-election in November, though the official City Hall feed is fairly lively — Koch covers a wider span of topics. And unlike fellow former Mayor Rudy Guiliani, Koch has not set his account to private status. Any citizen of the Internet can follow Mayor Koch. (There is a @daviddinkins account on Twitter, but the author’s avatar looks nothing like the man who succeeded Koch as mayor.)
While Koch is new to Twitter, the octogenarian is a veteran of YouTube. He has posted 40 clips to his own channel on the video-sharing service, where he moonlights as a film and television critic. Viewers can learn what the former mayor thought of Betty White’s recent hosting gig on Saturday Night Live:
whats goin on these days ? evry politician joins Twitter…
Liabray of Congress will Archive all Tweets, they say Over a third of their members of Congress are officially on Twitter… Now we know why nothing is getting done!