By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter

MADISON — On the topic of the campaign to recall him, Gov. Scott Walker has lived by the adage —  silence is golden.

He’s said very little publicly on the recall campaign, officially launched this week by state Democrats and the liberal coalition United Wisconsin, letting the warring parties battle over the unprecedented effort.

Walker's supporters say the governor is more concerned with doing his job, getting the state's economy back on track, than the politics surrounding the recall initiative. His critics have said Walker is hiding from the organized drive to oust him.

But the governor and his campaign stepped into the fray, albeit briefly, Wednesday and Thursday, voicing his rebuttals to the recall push in what has become a familiar forum for politicians: Twitter.

“State Democrats will join w/nat big govnt union bosses in recall effort against me,” Walker wrote Wednesday on his campaign Twitter account ScottKWalker, encouraging supporters to “Join r grass-roots movement @ http://www.ScottWalker.org.”

On Thursday, the Walker camp followed up, tweeting, “Angry protests & recalls don't lead to more jobs. Real plans & an optimistic outlook leads to more jobs.”

Opponents — “followers” of the governor’s tweets — fired back. A follower identified as Fullerjohn1119 rejoined, “angry protests and recalls are the voice of your constituents needing to be heard. We have no other means."

Walker’s campaign did not return an email seeking comment, nor did the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Katie McCallum, spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, when contacted by Wisconsin Reporter about the governor’s tweets, said she would call back with a comment. She did not.

While the news media may not always track down the governor or others in the spotlight, political observers say direct democracy is alive and well thanks to social media — and it's galvanizing political action.

“Social media is incredibly important, as we saw in the 2008 election,” said Andrew Kersten, chairman of democracy and justice studies at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, referring to what many saw as then-candidate Barrack Obama’s masterful use of technology to spur votes and propel him into the White House.

It’s become even more significant, according to a report tracking social media's use during the 2010 elections, conducted by the Internet & American Life Project, part of the nonprofit “fact tank” Pew Research Center. The survey of 2,257 adults, conducted in November, had a margin of error of 2.4 percent. It found:

• Fifty-four percent of adults used the Internet for political purposes during the 2010 election cycle, far surpassing the 2006 midterm contest.
• One-quarter of American adults got most of their campaign information from the Internet during the 2010 midterm elections, a threefold increase from the 7 percent who said this during the 2002 midterm elections.
• Some 22 percent of online adults used Twitter or social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, in the months leading up to the 2010 elections to connect to the campaign or the election.

Today, groups like the tea party and Occupy Wall Street have used Facebook, the blogosphere and Twitter to spur rallies and political activity.

"Almost all of us are on overload with the Internet, email, blogs and those types of things," Marv Munyon, a founder of Rock River Patriots, a south central Wisconsin tea party organization, told Wisconsin Reporter. "A lot of people are tuned into what’s going on in the state and want to be up-to-date, and (social media) is the quickest means of doing it."

Still, social media only has so much pull in politics, Kersten said. And the political science professor said it will take more than tweets to get people to the polls in a Wisconsin statewide recall election.

“To a certain extent, that is about boots on the ground, going door to door to get people to the polls,” Kersten said. “Social media has a spur-to-action type effect in the Democratic process. It’s a motivator.” But it doesn’t necessarily close the deal.

Social media may backfire for campaigns, too, the Pew Internet research suggests.

“Many (poll respondents) expressed positive views about the effect of digital technology on their personal engagement with politics, but also noted concerns about the ways in which the Internet might be influencing the broader culture and tone of politics,” the survey found.

For better or worse, social media has changed participation in democracy, and promises to have a broader effect on the 2012 elections. Kersten said plenty of positives can be drawn from this brave new world of political communication.

“My mother, the old pacifist anarchist who grew up in Cuba always said, ‘If voting mattered, it would have been outlawed,'” Kersten said. “But I think we want people engaged, and that’s what social media, like Twitter does.”