For all the snark about Twitter as a communications tool (Sarah Palin famously using it, but many others too – Portland Mayor Sam Adams has burn up the Twitter lines in the last few years) there’s nothing wrong with it when used in the right way. It can be used well, or abused.

Consider the post from Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt: “Leavitt for Congress?”

Before that, he hadn’t been widely considered a prospect. So why the tweet? “It was a simple question and Twitter is a simple media. Frankly, all I wanted to do was put a question out there to garner some response.”

It has worked, and then some. It’s generated a lot of response and commentary, and no small amount of news media coverage. The decision of whether to enter a race for the U.S. House – against freshman Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler – may have a lot of components, but in the end it’s binary: Go or not. Twitter could help with that.

Probably has.

One other cautionary note about the prospect, however, should be raised: No one knows what the Vancouver-area district may look like on the other end of reapportionment, a process which is far from over. But Leavitt will certainly be in one district or another.