In his latest Sunday column, the New York Times's Frank Rich slams John McCain for not knowing how to use a computer. " ... surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is" a "qualification for president in 2008," Rich writes. He connects McCain's cluelessness on economics to his Luddite-ism.
Rich links to a blog on Mojo (Mother Jones) in which Jonathan Stein asks, "Do we want a commander-in-chief who can't use a computer without assistance?"
Stein does not mention that American had just that in Bill Clinton. He doesn't use a computer either and he's a generation younger than McCain. Bill Clinton has the excuse that he was imprisoned in the White House when the internet became huge; although that didn't stop his vice president, Al Gore, from being obsessed with the "world wide web" as a tool for research and communication.
McCain was free and in the senate when the internet took hold; he just never saw a need to learn how to use it -- probably less a matter of lack of curiosity than the fact that senators are surrounded by aides who do it for them. (During the years that McCain was literally imprisoned in Vietnam, an IBM Selectric counted as high tech. )
As I wrote about Clinton in my recent book, and blogged here: When I was writing Clinton in Exile, I heard often about how technologically challenged the former president is. Aides to Bill Clinton told me that when they were in the White House Al Gore used to laugh at his boss's Luddite ways. "Gore used to make fun of Clinton all the time for not knowing how to turn on his computer," Elaine Kamarck, who had been a senior adviser to Gore, told me. Clinton still does not use a computer; he does not, and probably wisely, given his penchant for erupting into rages, use email -- his emails, news and blogs are printed out for him.
But once Clinton learned how to use the cell phone -- it took awhile before he figured out how not to cut people off mid call and got used to no longer having the White House operator place his calls in the middle of the night (his preferred time) -- he came to rely on his cell phone. Former aides such as Leon Panetta told me that Clinton by nature prefers to communicate by telephone (as opposed to email).
John McCain is not known for waxing enthusiastic about the internet; Bill Clinton, oddly, was. One of the people closet to the Clintons, Ira Magaziner was the "brains" behind Hillary's massive failure with national health care. Magaziner picked himself up from that fiasco and became Bill Clinton's chief Internet adviser, making sure that the Internet did not get carved up like radio frequencies and that it remained a global free-trade zone.
As I wrote in Clinton in Exile,
When he moved into the White House in 1993 there were approximately 50 websites; by the time he moved out, there were more than five million..... In a speech Clinton gave to a DNC fund-raiser the night before the Monica [Lewinsky] story exploded in January 1998, he correctly described the Internet as `The fastest growing means of communication in human history.'" Clinton, despite his love of his cell phone, has called the Internet a more important technological advance than the telephone.
Clinton has not made the move to a Blackberry; his one-time friend, George H.W. Bush is addicted to his. Will the "odd couple" re-up their friendship? If Bill ever gets out there to campaign for Obama will attacks on "W" make a rapproachment impossible? That's a subject for another blog.
"W," by the way, was said to be an avid emailer before he took office; but stopped for privacy and security reasons once he moved into the White House.