John Murrell of the Merc on McCain's tech sensibilities:
Uh, Cindy, it's one of those 3 a.m. crisis calls -- can you sign me on to the Net?: So I was reading Sunday's New York Times interview with Sen. John McCain, and when I got to the part about how he doesn't use e-mail and depends on his aides to click him through to various blogs and news sites, my first reactions were a chuckle, an eye-roll and a shake of the head. Until it started to sink in.
Here's
some of what McCain said during the interview (as his wife, Cindy, and several top aides sat by tapping on their BlackBerries). The Times asked, "Do you go online yourself?" McCain, referring to his aides answered, "They go on for me. 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 - including going to my daughter's blog first, before anything else. ... I don't e-mail; I've never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone."
OK, if he were the 72-year-old guy down the block, I could cut him some slack. Whatever age you are, if you don't have any use for the Net, if you don't want the hassle of learning all that new stuff, fine (and I mean that, Mom, despite the grief I give you). But if you're running for the highest office in the land and one of the most powerful positions on earth, shouldn't you at least know how to log on to the freakin' Internet by yourself? "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon." Have it down fairly soon? It's a double-click, Senator. A little closer together, sir -- click-click. Sheesh. Ordinary folks from 3 to 103 have picked this up in minutes, and he'll have it down fairly soon.
What bothers me is not so much that McCain is uninvolved with the technology, but that he's
willfully uninvolved -- an aspiring 21st century leader who simply has neither the interest nor the initiative to take even the easiest steps toward personally participating in 21st century communication. To me, that's a warning sign of a mind that has stopped exploring, content that it pretty much knows what it needs to know -- a common enough quality, but not a good one in a leader.
