September 13, 2008
McCain and that interweb thing
From Forbes, May 29th, 2000...
McCain himself was convinced early on that the Internet had to play a critical role in the campaign. Time and again it allowed him to leverage his money and his organization. "In the Virginia primary," McCain told me, "we needed a lot of petitions signed to get on the ballot. We had the form available to download off the Internet and got 17,000 signatures with very little trouble."
Ultimately, McCain realized he couldn't go the distance, but the message was clear to any political organization with hopes for the future. His Web team had played the Internet like a Stradivari. Ballot petitioning was simplified. Local email brought out large crowds on a few hours' notice. The Web was used to enlist phone bankers from all over the country to download voter lists in upcoming primary states and then to make calls from their homes. Hundreds of thousands were reached at virtually no cost, compared to the going rate of 50 cents for every call from a professional phone bank. The Web became a virtual political print shop enabling thousands of volunteers to download and reproduce millions of pieces of campaign literature and signs on their home printers. The various pages on McCain's Web site were used to put out key registration information and to douse political fires....
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.
Beside the point of how callous it was for Obama to mock McCain for supposedly not knowing how to email, when the reason is McCain's war injuries, McCain has proven that not only does he know the internet (including email), but knows how to find talented people to get done what he needs done.
Did Obama design his own web site, or did he hire someone else to do it? Did Obama do the backend scripting himself, or hire a web programmer to handle it?
Ironically it seems some of the things Obama has done on his own web site were tactics and ideas McCain did in earlier campaigns.
Hat tip: Ace of Spades
Posted by Danny Carlton at September 13, 2008 10:27 PM
What injuries were those? His broken arms and legs? That wouldn't stop anybody. Perhaps you can point me to a website that would detail these injuries that John McCain had that would prevent him from using a computer. I suppose they tortured his voice box so that Dragon Naturally Speaking is out? Pity.
Posted by: Non Ame at September 13, 2008 10:51 PM
Well, let's experiment and see. Have someone tie your arms behimd your back, so far that you elbows and wrists touch (this was confirmed by numerous POWs) and leave you that way all day long, every day for 5 years. Then let's break several of your fingers, and when they are about halfway healed, break them again, repeating that over the course of five years.
When you're through with the little experiment, let me know how well you can use a computer keyboard.
Oh, and I have worked with blind people on their computer set up. It is extremely difficult using a computer without a keyboard and mouse and monitor. Try it and see for yourself.
Posted by: Danny Carlton at September 14, 2008 8:02 AM
Oh, John McCain is blind now? Wow, those disabilities just keep on coming don't they? Drop the act, John McCain can see, and if he can point one finger, he can type. There are numerous products on the market today that don't even require that.
I notice you didn't provide that link detailing John McCain's injuries. Don't have one do you? You have no idea what his injuries were. I guess that makes it all the easier to claim it was an injury and not the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing. Oh wait, he said that he doesn't know what he's doing. In June. Of this year. http://tinyurl.com/3lxq3v. The exact quote when asked if he uses a Mac or a PC. "Neither, I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get." Illiterate? His words, not mine. Doesn't sound like an injury to me.
An experiment for you, while I'm waiting for a Viet Cong to shoot down my plane. Take the list of injuries inflicting John McCain, and compare them to the disabilities of Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking regularly uses a computer. This is a paragraph from a web page of his.
"I can save what I write to disk. I write papers using a formatting program called TEX. I can write equations in words, and the program translates them into symbols, and prints them out on paper in the appropriate type. I can also give lectures. I write the lecture beforehand, and save it on disk. I can then send it to the speech synthesiser, a sentence at a time. It works quite well, and I can try out the lecture, and polish it, before I give it."
There are people in this world that really do suffer from ailments that limit what they can do. Stephen Hawking has ailments that John McCain couldn't even dream of, yet he gets around them. Are you saying that John McCain can't?
Posted by: Non Ame at September 14, 2008 2:49 PM
