Late last night, I was thinking about the Obama campaign’s ad that hits McCain for not using a computer, and the obvious and glaring point that an inability to type because of war injuries would impede using a computer. I concluded that it was less an outrage than revealing — that Team Obama really thinks that using a computer is vital criteria for the next president, and that this is where they want to plant their flag and make their stand. (Nevermind that I would bet a doughnut that as president, Obama would never use a computer or BlackBerry because of security concerns and questions of whether the communications would be covered by executive privilege. That’s what keeps Bush off the “Internets.“)
But then I saw the Forbes item…
> In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the
> Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S.
> Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of
> email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife,
> Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for
> McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on
> a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain
> admits.
…and I began to think this ad could do Obama some real damage. I’d drop the ad, or at least that line, if I were them.