NYT: McCain, the Analog Candidate
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: August 3, 2008
....The self-described “Neanderthal” of the Grand Old Party (emphasis, old) has been catching flack for admitting that he is no techno-geek. He not only did not invent the Internet, he can barely use it. “I don’t expect to set up my own blog,” he told the New York Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper. The Times has learned that Mr. McCain does not text, Treo or Twitter, either....We joke, but the serious question — and one that has occupied many of the blogs and discussion groups that Mr. McCain does not partake of — is whether the computing habits of the presumptive Republican nominee should have any bearing at all on his fitness to be commander in chief....
Computers have become something of a cultural marker — in politics and in the real world. Proficiency with them suggests a basic familiarity with the day-to-day experience of most Americans — just as ignorance to them can suggest someone is “out of touch,” or “old.”
“We’re not asking for a president to answer his own e-mail,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist who teaches at Stanford. “We’re asking for a president who understands the context of what e-mail means.” The “user experience,” Mr. Saffo said, brings with it an implicit understanding of how the country lives, and where it might be heading. As Mr. McCain would lack this, he would also be deficient in this broader appreciation for how technology affects lives....
In the rarefied context of the Oval Office...there can be great value in having a president who has an intuitive sense of how a technology works, said Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications entrepreneur and investor who wrote the recent book “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of how Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.”...Mr. Wheeler, a supporter and fundraiser for Mr. McCain’s Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, said that Lincoln was the model of a president who embraced technology. Lincoln’s mastery of the telegraph machine not only put him well ahead of most of his constituents on the technology curve but also allowed him to speak directly to his generals and track their actions.
Lincoln gave a speech in 1860 that said the United States’ responsiveness to new technology was the chief virtue separating it from Europe....
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The McCain campaign is sensitive to the notion that his limited knowledge of computing could be taken as a signal that he is blind to technology. “You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” said Mark Soohoo, a McCain aide for online matters, at a conference on politics and technology. “You actually do,” interrupted Tracy Russo, a former blogger for John Edwards....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/weekinreview/03leibovich.html
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