Spanish politicians’ kids tweet the darndest things

While U.S. news outlets focus on Missouri Republican Todd Akin’s explosive comments about rape victims, their Spanish counterparts are busy reporting on a decidedly more frivolous political gaffe. On Monday, a strange tweet appeared on the account of José Antonio Monago, the president of the regional government in Extremadura, in western Spain.

"I just got up to 2.215 in #DoodleJump!!!" the tweet crowed, in reference to the wildly popular smartphone game that allows players to assume the identity of a jumpy four-legged creature and conquer obstacles and monsters. "Beat that!"

As you might expect, Twitter users, instead of picking up the Doodler’s gauntlet, greeted Monago’s message with the obligatory cat calls — forcing the politician to shutter his besieged Twitter account. "Working hard for a normal salary?" one user asked, mocking the recent statement by a member of the center-right Popular Party, to which Monago belongs, that Spanish politicians work doggedly for modest pay (Doodle Jump only costs $0.99).

According to the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, local officials have since explained that Monago’s son accidentally posted the results of his Doodle Jump game on his father’s feed, and that Monago will reactivate his Twitter account as soon as he can confirm that "an incident like the one involving the Doodle game won’t happen again" (translation: son, your Doodling days are over). A spokesperson for Monago described the matter more poetically, urging people not to blow "a tweet from an innocent hand" out of proportion.

What’s particularly remarkable about this story is that this isn’t the first time a Spanish politician’s son has posted the results of a smartphone game on his parent’s Twitter account, unleashing mass derision (nor is it the first time that the children of Spanish leaders have found themselves at the center of controversy: remember the photo of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s goth daughters?). In June, shortly after Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced a €100 billion eurozone rescue for Spanish banks, Fátima Báñez, Spain’s minister of employment and social security, stunned her followers by tweeting, "I scored 5,390 points in Bubble Shooter Adventures! Can you do better?"

Talk of "Bubble Shooter" on Twitter quickly eclipsed a previously trending hashtag that sought to compile questions for Rajoy on the bank bailout. Báñez’s aides attributed the message, which was quickly deleted, to a "childish prank" by her son, who had borrowed his mother’s phone. When Monago’s Doodle Jump tweet began circulating this week, Twitter users gleefully reported that the politician had pulled "a Fátima Báñez."

The lesson in all this appears to be that politicians should keep their phones far away from their children (unless, of course, Monago and Báñez are in fact avid gamers who have chosen to scapegoat their kids). But perhaps there’s another takeaway as well. People obviously pay a lot of attention to these kinds of tweets — instead of running from them, why not adopt the language to tout the government’s successes? For example, Rajoy recently announced on Twitter that his government would continue making monthly payments of €400 to the long-term unemployed. Just think how much more attention he would have gotten had he tweeted, "I just approved €400 in monthly jobless aid. Beat that!"