Twitter Skewers Michigan Governor After Lead-Free Kids Tweet

Poor Rick Snyder. The Michigan governor helped turn the financially fraught state around after the 2008 recession threatened to topple its all-important auto industry, and in doing so, turned heads at the Republican National Committee. Snyder, a political outsider until he was elected to his first term as governor in 2010, was considered one of the GOP’s rising stars. At one point last year, he was expected to run for president.

But the governor fell hard from political grace almost as quickly as lead leached from Flint’s aging pipes when the city switched from a relatively clean source of water, Lake Huron, to the more corrosive water from the Flint River. The problem was treatable, but two former workers with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality and a Flint water plant employee were criminally charged and accused of lying about whether the corrective measures were taken and manipulating records.

By January, when the world knew that thousands of Flint residents had been exposed to lead in their drinking water — potentially a life sentence of underachievement and behavioral issues for still-developing children — Snyder became Public Enemy No. 1. Fairly or unfairly, he became the scapegoat for what he called a failure of government at multiple levels.

Though he has never been accused of wrongdoing in his handling of the mess, the Flint water crisis has become the governor’s Waterloo. Congress more or less eviscerated Snyder in hearings early this year, and he was scorched in an unscientific Fortune magazine poll, which named him the world’s second-most disappointing leader (first was Dilma Rouseff, the president of Brazil until she was impeached in August under the cloud of a corruption scandal).

Snyder, whose Twitter handle is @onetoughnerd, is no quitter (no matter how much some Michiganders may wish he was). He took responsibility for the mess.

And then Lead Poisoning Prevention Week rolled around (it ends Oct. 29). Governors regularly do this kind of thing, so Snyder — who has said all along, in a manner of speaking, that if he could have a do-over, he would not hesitate to hop into a time machine and see that things were handled differently in Flint — sent an innocuous tweet this week about (wait for it) keeping kids safe from lead.

The focus of this year’s awareness week, set aside by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — which has also been blamed in Flint’s public health catastrophe — is specifically on lead in drinking water supplies and steps parents can take to reduce their kids’ exposure to lead.

(Move from Flint? Complain that the water looks like “poop water” and ask officials in your city to give you the straight and skinny poop on what’s up with that? Wait, Flint residents already took that route in 2014, and they’re still drinking bottled water.)

You can see where this is headed, and boy oh boy, did the Twittersphere ever pile on.

Ouch. Good thing Snyder is one tough nerd.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey via Flickr Commons