John McCain Discovers the Internet

A year ago, after Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he's a "very low-tech person" who doesn't use e-mail, and President Bush acknowleged he had a thing or two to learn about cyberattacks, I posed this rhetorical question in a column : "Is it too much to ask at this stage that top federal leaders have at least a working knowledge of technology?"

Apparently so. John McCain revealed in a New York Times interview this weekend that he's pretty low-tech himself. He told the paper he relies on his wife and and two aides to deal with this whole Internet thing. “They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

Also, McCain said he's “never felt the particular need to e-mail.”

It's easy to joke about this stuff, and there are good reasons why a politican might not want to personally leave the online trail that e-mailing entails. But setting aside the issue of whether the country should be run by people who basically never go near a computer, it's hard to imagine how they make it through a working day or week without doing so.

I know that top career officials in government used to get by having their assistants handle all computer-related tasks for them, but that's not true any more, is it?