Monday, January 3, 2011

Rough Start for Steelman

Sarah Steelman announced she was running for Senate against Claire McCaskill way back on December 1. She proceeded to waste four weeks of time where she could have gotten as much free press coverage as she wanted as the only official Republican candidate (Jim Talent had said he would wait until after the holidays to decide). She then "officially" declared and launched her website on the week between Christmas and New Years, generally a bad idea for someone trying to maximize coverage. And now, as pointed out by intrepid twitterer Arthur Nunn, her website seems more than a little vulnerable for chicanery:

Steelman had set up her page so that it would automatically display tweets with certain hash tags. For example (click the photo for a larger view):

Of course, there's nothing wrong with her ad appearing on Grindr (though I suppose it could be a weapon that could be used to drive social conservatives away from her campaign), and Steelman was lucky that Nunn was pretty benign in illustrating his point. But it seems like a site flaw that could easily be used against her campaign for much more nefarious purposes.

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