Jared Polis is a hoopy frood (and that’s a good thing)

Boulder Rep. Jared Polis was singled out last week by ColoradoPols for something that’s all too rare in politics—a refreshingly savvy voice in his online musings, from his Twitter feed to a recent “Ask me anything” appearance on Reddit, where ColoradoPols’ ProgressiveCowgirl gave him props for giving “answers like a real person, not a conglomerate produced by a communications team.”

You bet he’s a real person and he’s never been afraid to let you know it. Consider this exchange between Polis, who is an avid gamer, and one of the Reddit folks:

Taehoong: My friend does not like League of Legends, but she has said that she will play the game if she plays with a congressman. Will you play with us, please?

jaredpolis: only if u are constituents of mine ;-p Also, not sure I want to play with noobs like your friend…

hobbsface2000: You sir, are awesome.

Arvald: my god a politician that is actually a real person, this guy is awesome.

Awesome barely covers it. What other elected official can be both nerdy enough to know that a Twitter reference to him as a “hoopy frood” is a compliment from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and proud enough to retweet it with a hashtag? He’s even telling the media how to use social media, when generally it’s the other way around with congressmen, as in this tweet to the Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels:

@lynn_bartels lynn when you tweet my name use @jaredpolis rather than Jared Polis

Yeah, Lynn! This is 2012, baby!

But we all know that even the wittiest of tweeters can have an off day and apparently Polis was either too riveted or too bored with the State of the Union address to properly summon his 140-character muse while tweeting last night. The New York Times was keeping an eye on Congress’s Twitter feeds during the speech, posting selected messages to the front page of its website to provide some ongoing commentary from the peanut gallery. And what did our self-described “gay, Jewish, gamer, nerd, baseball fan, retired florist, alfalfa farmer, numismatist, tarot reader, new father, beekeeper” Representative have to say?

@jaredpolis: On the House floor for State of the Union, sitting w my CO colleagues R & D

Oh #yawn, really? Who knows … maybe it was witty compared to what others were posting. OK, so it’s cool that our rep was retweeted by the Times, but what a missed opportunity to show the rest of the Twittersphere that our 2^nd Congressional District representative is no noob when it comes to social media.

We expect more, sir, from a hoopy frood such as yourself.

(Tip ‘o the hat to ProgressiveCowgirl at ColoradoPols)