http://www.newsweek.com/id/148980Anna Quindlen
The Techie in Chief
The terrorists have laptops in their hideouts. Can America afford to have a leader who is just learning how to use one?
Published Jul 26, 2008
Honest Abe was a techie. Yep, it's true. President Lincoln pushed hard for the spread of telegraph lines across the country and used the new medium to make communications with his generals during the Civil War swift and specific. Sometimes he even slept on the couch in the telegraph office when he was monitoring battlefield conditions. In his book "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails," author Tom Wheeler brings the language of Silicon Valley to Gettysburg. "Lincoln's early-adopter instincts," he writes, "coupled with his being unburdened by the old dogmas, allowed him to outperform his generals in the ability to see change and harness it to his purpose."
Paging John McCain. Or at least calling him. Because he doesn't text-message. Or have a BlackBerry. Or use e-mail. Anyhow, he might want to pay more attention to Lincoln's successful future-think.
When the Republican candidate described himself earlier this year as a computer illiterate who had never gone online, it just made him look odd. And old. Of course, that's not fair. Both my father and my mother-in-law are somewhat older than McCain (although indubitably young at heart), and both of them have been using e-mail for years. While only one in three Americans over the age of 65 goes online, surveys of McCain's peer group—older, white, well educated—find the number rises to three out of four. Almost half of Americans say they've used the Internet, e-mail or text messaging to follow this presidential election. It's as though the senator had been invited to a massive rally of tens of millions of voters, and was reluctant to attend because getting there might be a bit of a hassle.
But McCain's explanation, that he depended on aides and his wife to show him what's in cyberspace, didn't only make him seem behind the curve. It made him seem Out of It. And that's important, because Out of It is what Americans cannot afford in a president at this moment. OOI describes too many of our leaders, in business and industry as well as politics. It means that manufacturing executives don't get ahead of the curve of consumer desires, that government-agency heads are often blind to how their policies really work for ordinary people, and that political figures can be insensible to undercurrents because they are always sailing over the mainstream.
snip//
The president of the United States in 2008 can't afford to be OOI. That's more dangerous than a CEO of a big automaker who doesn't go into disgruntled-buyer chat rooms, or the chief executive of a pharma company who hasn't read the personal complaints about uncommon side effects online. In the intelligence community, America's tech shortcomings have been an open secret for years. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the head of the National Security Agency went on television and described the United States as "behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution."
So McCain's admission that he was behind the same curve raises a larger, more troubling question: if Osama bin Laden beat us with a laptop, shouldn't we at least have a president who is reasonably conversant with one? After all, some historians believe that one of the reasons the North prevailed during the Civil War is because Lincoln was savvy enough to use the most sophisticated means of communication available. If Senator McCain wants to know how it turns out for those who aren't as adaptable, he could take a look at Jefferson Davis. You can Google him. If you do that sort of thing. Or even know what it means.
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