McCain vs. Lincoln on Technology

Newsweek's Anna Quindlen weighs in on the whole John McCain as technophobe issue this this week. She leads with a great quote from the book In Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails, by Tom Wheeler, about Abraham Lincoln's eager embrace of the cutting-edge communication technology of his generation -- the telegraph.

"Lincoln's early-adopter instincts," Wheeler 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."

McCain's response to the Mac-or-PC question about his computer preferences -- "neither" -- "sounded pretty last-generation," Quindlen writes, "like those execs who have their assistants print out the e-mail. Maybe that's why the McCain camp has suddenly gotten aggressive on the tech defense front, putting out a recent statement that says the candidate is now "becoming more familiar with the Internet." Good thing. It's America's keyhole. It pays to listen."

As Quindlen notes, the issue here isn't that McCain is old. There are plenty of people his age and older who e-mail and use the Web regularly, and some who do much more than that. The issue is that he's willfully ignoring technological advances that are having a dramatic effect on the way the country -- and the federal government -- operates.