03:07 pm
Hail to the Technophobe
My dad is 87 years old. He’s in great shape. He plays golf regularly, is a life master in bridge, and writes a weekly column on his town for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He also is a blogger — well not a blogger so much as a proto-blogger: he writes a weekly email newsletter that has several hundred subscribers. I wouldn’t call him a technophile, but he definitely understands the basics of how to use a computer.
So if my dad, who is significantly older (sorry dad) than John McCain, can manage to go online, email, and publish an electronic newsletter, why can’t John McCain even get on a computer?
From today’s NYT:
[John McCain] said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.
“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”
Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”
At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.
As he answered questions, sipping a cup of coffee with his tie tight around his neck, his aides stared down at their BlackBerries.
As they tapped, Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.
A lot of bloggers have made fun of McCain for being what my friend Jodi likes to call a techno tard. They laugh at his saying that he was “doing a Google” to find a VP, his disdain for bloggers (wait a second — how can he hate the bloggers when he doesn’t even know how to get online to read the bloggers?), and his sheepish acknowledgments (this is not the first) that he really doesn’t understand the Internet.
I can certainly understand why this is amusing. I’ve made fun of him for it as well. To me, the funniest part of the above passage his the fact that Cindy had to remind him that his daughter has a blog he was supposed to be reading. Given Meghan’s spoiled little rich girl routine extraordinarily nuanced understanding of policy, I’d think he would want to read it every day.
But then I thought about it some more and stopped laughing. This is actually quite serious. Given the degree to which technology dominates our lives — from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the use of satellites in the war on terror gobal war on terror the long war global struggle against extremism war on terror to the overnight mail distribution center, computers have become, oh I don’t know, essential.
So McCain’s stubborn failure to grasp the importance of technology in our daily lives is actually quite disturbing. Can we really afford a technophobe as President? What happens if Al Qaeda mounts a massive attack on our electronic infrastructure? Will our response be slowed because a President McCain does not understand the consequences — or even worse, has to have it all explained to him? Or will his instinct be to respond in a way that is either inconsistent with or completely disconnected from the challenge at hand?
Let me be clear here. I don’t want the next President tethered to a crackberry 24/7. I agree that it’s important for our chief executive officer to focus on making decisions. But not having a laptop in the oval office is not the same thing as having someone who doesn’t understand how to use one.
Let me put it another way. Would we choose a President who couldn’t speak English?
Oh wait, we already did that.
And look where that got us.
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