Pat Quinn's Brain & "Shady" Bill Brady Face Off On Twitter

By Karl Klockars in News on Aug 24, 2010 6:20PM

Among the great political battles we've seen in our times - Nixon v. Kennedy, Bush v. Gore, Abraham Lincoln vs. vampires - now we can add the head-to-head matchup of Pat Quinn's Brain versus Shady Bill Brady. While the actual candidates are busy hashing out real issues like budget, taxes, and jobs, their online doppelgangers are pulling less punches on Twitter.

With the introduction of Pat Quinn's Brain to the Tweetyspaces late last week (as first noticed by CapitolFax), social media became the new destination for gubernatorial political sniping. The governor's brain joins Shady Bill Brady on Twitter, and both accounts claim to be unconnected to either campaign. The Quinn/Simon campaign have connected themselves to the WhoIsBillBrady site, but ShadyBillBrady leads you to the Joe Barrios-esque Bill Brady For Illinois. That site is "neither affiliated with nor paid for by any campaign, candidate or committee," although if it were, we'd like to meet the political consultant who would come up with a photoshopped Bill Brady + Scarface image. PatQuinnsBrain claims no connected URL. (ETA: Don't forget about StopBillBrady on Twitter, and if there are others as well, feel free to update us on those as well.)

Jpeg manipulation aside, how successful is the message? We take a look at some of the tweets in question, after the jump.

The Shady Bill Brady account, entertaining photoshopping aside, seems to focus on simply passing on anti-Brady info with a healthy amount of snark and a touch of smartassery on the side:

• Yikes-Bill Brady's campaign mgr raising $$ for extremist tea party groups?! #ILGov #Twill http://u.nu/7thwe (via @CapitolFax)
• Someone oughta do a little looking into Bill Brady's chief of staff too. Just sayin' // RT @WJBC: Quinn's chief of staff resigns amid probe
• Bill Brady wouldn't know the truth if it ran him over in a Porsche / RT @sjrbreakin Pat Quinn on Bill Brady's budget plan http://ow.ly/2rDo0

While Pat Quinn's Brain is healthily amusing - and potentially damaging:

• You want message discipline? Today's message is jobs. Specifically, who will be hired as my new Chief of Staff? #twill #ILGOV #Quinn
• I need a new Chief of Staff. Only ethically pure people willing to take 24 unpaid furlough days a year need apply. #twill #ILGOV #Quinn
• I am doing a press conference to support outlawing former Governors convicted of felonies from appearing at Comic-Con. http://bit.ly/dqWyPx

That the Quinn campaign has a problem with messaging isn't anything new, but making a Democrat in blue-state Illinois more easily mockable than the GOP candidate is pretty impressive. And before you holler about Blago, remember that Judy Baar Topinka got just as much razzing in '06 as our current statewide embarassment of an ex-governor. Making our current governor into as much of a cartoon would be a major accomplishment.

We can't believe we're saying this, but we're going to give the (presumably) Republican account the nod when it comes to humor. And since when has the GOP ever been funny? Scott Lee Cohen has enough reason to want revenge, but his twitter feed is bone-dry. Rich Whitney has gotta be behind this somehow.

The only way to solve this, obviously, is to let each account gain some more followers - then put them head-to-head in a StupidFight.