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McCain On the Internet: ‘I’m Learning to Get Online Myself'

thinkprogress.org —

John McCain has acknowledged that he is “an illiterate” when it comes to computers. He said he “has to rely on his wife for all the assistance he can get.” At the Personal Democracy Forum last month, McCain aide Mark Soohoo argued in McCain’s defense that “you don’t have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country.”



When asked if he goes online... He responds with this.
Mr. McCain: They go on for me."



These are 2 comments are from posters in regards to the article:


Doesn't this remind you of the whole "do you fill up your own gas?" issue that popped up a while back? Is there ANYTHING that he does for himself?xstarsprinklesx, on 07/14/2008, -1/+9It's not just age, it's lack of effort. My grandfather is 81 and has been using a computer for years, plus an HDTV and a TiVo. He still has to call and ask for help sometimes, but he knows how to use it all. Of course most older people aren't hardcore computer geeks, but there are certainly a good number who at least use email.



+108 diggs +116 / -8 richmomz
on 07/13/2008 He's admitted that he doesn't know jack about economics either. In fact, it's not very clear what experience, ANY experience, he is bringing to the table as a viable presidential candidate. How this guy ever became a presidential frontrunner, I have no idea.

ITA with Diggs above..., it is like the words came right out of MY mouth.

My parents-in-law are just a little younger than McCain, they learned now how to use emails so there's still hope for him. (hopefully )

Found this in jib-jab!

It's Time for Some Campaignin'!

Totally cool video. LOL..

quote:

Originally posted by Mrs. B.:
Found this in jib-jab!

It's Time for Some Campaignin'!

CRAZY Mrs B! LOL. JibJab Always A favorite!!!

Yup, this one's nice, I think I'll transfer it to the "funny" thread.

Here's a nice article about the American electorate from yesterday's edition of the Washington Post.

Another Peek Inside the Brain of the Electorate

Voters interviewed in the recent past showed an ignorance similar to that found in a study nearly 50 years ago. (By Bruce Twitchell -- Idaho State Journal Via Associated Press)





Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2008; Page C01

So a bunch of academics decides to revisit one of the defining books of modern American politics, a 1960 tome on the electorate. They spend years comparing interviews with voting-age Americans from 2000 and 2004 to what Americans said during elections in the 1950s. The academics' question: How much has the American voter changed over the past 50 years?

Their conclusion -- that the voter is pretty much the same dismally ill-informed creature he was back then -- continues a decades-long debate about whether Americans are as clueless as they sound.

Reader, before you send that outraged e-mail, consider that you may be an exception. You, of course, are endlessly fascinated by the debate over domestic wiretapping, but it's possible your neighbors think FISA is a hybrid vehicle. In fact, it's quite possible your neighbors are Republicans only because that's what their parents were, and ditto for the Democrats across the street. They couldn't even mumble a passable definition of "liberal" or "conservative."

"You could get depressed," says the University of Iowa's Michael Lewis-Beck, one of the political scientists who wrote "The American Voter Revisited," released last month and inspired by 1960's "The American Voter."

Or not. Talk to other academics and it's unclear if we should be depressed at all. Many political scientists agree that the American voter doesn't always present well. Asked directly about certain issues, like whether he prefers diplomacy to military action for resolving international conflicts, he may profess ignorance or use some phrase he heard on television. Or she might say, when asked why she likes a candidate, "Oh, I just like the way he talks."


The question that political scientists have pondered for decades is: If a person can't name the staples of liberal ideology, or can't talk coherently about foreign affairs, or cares only about a few issues, or changes his opinion in response to information that he can't remember later, might he still be able to make thoughtful choices in the voting booth?

How much credit do we give our most precious resource, the American brain? Is it half-empty or half-full?

Americans "don't sound the way the high priests of culture want them to sound," says Samuel L. Popkin, author of "The Reasoning Voter," who tends to give voters more credit rather than less. "They use their own language. They process a lot more than they can recall in interviews. They have a lot better sense of who's on their side and who isn't than they're often given credit for."

One thing that's certain is that Americans are consistent. They've had difficulty articulating their opinions in ways that satisfy political scientists for decades. When "The American Voter" was released almost 50 years ago, it caused quite a splash. (Subsequent political scientists began referring to its authors with awe as "the four horsemen.") "The American Voter" was thick with statistical tables and a wonky theory called the "funnel of causality," all revealing that Americans have what William G. Jacoby of Michigan State University calls "incoherent, inconsistent, disorganized positions on issues."

The New York Times wrote about the book's findings when it came out, noting the role that Dwight Eisenhower's "strong personal appeal" played in helping him win the presidency in 1952 and 1956. His Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, spent a lot of time discussing issues of foreign policy, the paper wrote, but it turned out "the public was largely unaware of his positions."

Some academics criticized "The American Voter" for depicting voters as "fools," while others suggested the voters were not so much fools as, uh, "cognitive misers." (Aren't academic euphemisms the best?) The book spawned all sorts of follow-ups, like a rebuttal called "The Changing American Voter" and a rebuttal to the rebuttal called "The Unchanging American Voter."

Four years ago, Lewis-Beck and Jacoby and two other political scientists decided to take on "The American Voter" once more. They used the same methods to crunch the data and even organized the book the same way. (They had to eliminate the chapter on the agrarian vote, though, because there aren't enough farmers left anymore for a usable sample.)

"The American Voter Revisited" is chock-full of depressing conclusions, couched in academic understatement. In-depth interviews conducted with 1,500 people during the two most recent presidential elections revealed that the "majority of people don't have many issues in mind" when they discuss voting, Lewis-Beck says. Sometimes they say they're attracted to a candidate because "I just don't think we should change parties right now." They tend to inherit their party allegiance from their parents, and those beliefs tend to stay fixed throughout their lives, he says.

"For many people," the authors of "Revisited" write, "dealing with political issues is too much of a bother."

"If they know they're Republican and have been happy that way, they'll stay Republican," says another of the book's four authors, Herb Weisberg, who chairs the political science department at Ohio State University. Even for those voters who do rethink their allegiance to a given party -- because, say, the party in power has fouled things up -- "if times get better, they'll get back to where they were," Weisberg says. Their attachment to party is more emotional than intellectual, Lewis-Beck suggests, akin to their feelings for sports teams.

But wait, says Amy Gershkoff, who wrote her Princeton dissertation on issues and voting behavior and now advises left-of-center campaigns on how to target voters. She's got her own sports metaphor. Just as Beltway junkies know far more about policy issues than the average voter, baseball junkies know far more statistics than she does. But she still loves to watch the Yankees.

"Even though I can't rattle off the batting averages of every person on the team and every person on every other team doesn't mean that I can't derive pleasure from the game," she says.

In other words, Gershkoff says, she knows enough. Many Americans vote primarily because of one or two or three issues, she says. They might care a whole lot about health care or prayer in schools and not at all about foreign policy, and maybe that leaves them sounding dumb when they're asked about Iraq. But they know enough about the issues they care about, and that's what they vote on.

And how do they gather what they know? Popkin, whose own studies suggest that Americans' awareness of issues has been growing for decades, argues that voters use shortcuts to make judgments about the candidates, relying on things like endorsements, the advice of friends, and the candidate's party. So what if they forget much of what they've learned, so long as they absorb the lessons?

"If I say to you, 'What did the guy you didn't marry say to you in bed?' " and you can't remember, "does that mean you didn't enjoy it?" Popkin says.

Lewis-Beck says writing the book was a bracing experience for a political junkie. He's the kind of guy who tries to forecast elections the way fantasy baseball fans try to forecast players' performances. He writes papers with such titles as "Split-Ticket Voting: The Effects of Cognitive Madisonianism."

"A lot of people don't care about politics, okay?" he says. "They just don't care."

Or they care just enough.

The latest on the campaign trail:

Today on the presidential campaign trail By The Associated Press
Wed Jul 30, 3:24 AM ET


IN THE HEADLINES

McCain tries balancing act: brags of independence and seeks to reassure conservatives... Obama tells House Democrats he'll order review of White House executive orders ... Doctors say biopsy of skin from McCain's right cheek shows no evidence of cancer


Full article

(Just have to post this in full - the author made an interesting connection between Obama and my fave movie of all time - The Matrix.) Disclaimer: I'm not voting yet and neither am I favoring either McCain or Obama.


'The One'? Take a Number, Sen. Obama

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; C01



Neo: What is happening to me?

Morpheus: You are the One, Neo.

-- "The Matrix"

Wags in John McCain's camp reportedly have taken to referring to Barack Obama as "the One."

It's a sendup of the messianic devotion the Obamanauts sometimes display -- the huge crowds, the tears, the soaring hopes, the rapturous chanting of "O-ba-ma!" and "Yes we can!"

Ha-ha. Next, Obama's going to don a full-length black coat, like Keanu Reeves's Neo in the 1999 film, and start jumping really high in the process of saving mankind.

It's a smart bit of political jujitsu by the McCainiacs. Try to turn an opponent's potential strength into a potential weakness. Have they concluded their guy may become the next president, but he'll never be the One?

There have been so many Ones. The human imagination seems inclined to think in terms of them: King Arthur, Superman, Anakin Skywalker (or Luke, depending on your cosmology), Bobby Kennedy, John Galt, the Who's Tommy, Frodo, Bob Dylan, Siegfried, Harry Potter, Mighty Mouse, Godot, Joe Gibbs, Storm, Wonder Woman.

The One is the one who has the Answer. He will fix a fallen world. He will bring . . . change we can believe in.

The One is usually young, and he speaks inspiringly. A second coming is nice but not always advisable. (See Gibbs, Joe.)

Being the One means passing lots of tests, because at first no one believes in you. King Arthur had to pull Excalibur out of the stone to prove he was the One. Being the One means being tempted by your dark side. Anakin Skywalker succumbed -- the One can be fallible, if not always human -- transmogrified into Darth Vader, and only at the end managed to sort of live up to Obi-Wan's anguished declaration: "You were the chosen one! It was said that you would . . . bring balance to the Force!"

Being the One means conquering doubt about one's powers.

Neo: I'm not the One.

Oracle: Sorry, kid. You got the gift, but it looks like you're waiting for something.

Neo: What?

Oracle: Your next life maybe. Who knows? That's the way these things go.

Perhaps inevitably, being the One means letting down some of your followers. The Who's Tommy -- the "deaf, dumb and blind kid" who "sure plays a mean pinball" -- is idolized and then abandoned by the followers he tries to enlighten.

Obama plays a mean basketball. He has been tested, overcome doubts. If some of his true believers have placed outsize faith in him, he can't be blamed. After all, he slew the two-headed beast called Billary.

Sometimes he seems to playfully encourage his image as the One. Before the New Hampshire primary, he joked to an audience, "I am going to try to be so persuasive in the next 20 minutes or so that a light is going to shine down from the ceiling. . . . You will experience an epiphany. You will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.' "

He told House Democrats this week, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," our colleague Dana Milbank reported.

Also this week, the Obama campaign sent out an e-mail in the name of Michelle Obama to invite folks to contribute money for a chance to be among 10 lucky supporters who will get to "go backstage with Barack" at the Democratic convention in Denver, as if he were that special kind of One: the rock star.

But no, he is just a politician. So is John McCain. But one talks more like the One than the other one.

I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington. . . . I'm asking you to believe in yours.

-- Barack Obama

I know that you're afraid. . . . You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. . . . A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.

-- Neo


Source

Thanks again Mrs. B for this thread.


B u mping up this thread so we can get back to commenting in a normal and unbiased thread.

Now that we all know that Obama has blundered in taking on Joe Biden as his running mate.

Come Novemebr we will be celebrating the most humilating defeat the democrates have ever had. Biden?! What a bafoon.

Thanks too 4N.

I am now understanding why some think Biden is a mistake as Obama's VP. This is an article with that slant:

Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 23, 5:02 AM ET


The candidate of change went with the status quo.

In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness — inexperience in office and on foreign policy — rather than underscore his strength as a new-generation candidate defying political conventions.

He picked a 35-year veteran of the Senate — the ultimate insider — rather than a candidate from outside Washington, such as Govs. Tim Kaine of Virginia or Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; or from outside his party, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; or from outside the mostly white male club of vice presidential candidates. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't even make his short list.

The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

Democratic strategists, fretting over polls that showed McCain erasing Obama's lead this summer, welcomed the move. They, too, worried that Obama needed a more conventional — read: tougher — approach to McCain.

"You've got to hand it to the candidate and the campaign. They have a great sense of timing and tone and appropriateness. Six months ago, people said he wasn't tough enough on Hillary Clinton — he was being too passive — but he got it right at the right time," said Democratic strategist Jim Jordan. "He'll get it right again."

Indeed, Obama has begun to aggressively counter McCain's criticism with negative television ads and sharp retorts from the campaign trail.

A senior Obama adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his boss has expressed impatience with what he calls a "reverence" inside his campaign for his message of change and new politics. In other words, Obama is willing — even eager — to risk what got him this far if it gets him to the White House.

Biden brings a lot to the table. An expert on national security, the Delaware senator voted in 2002 to authorize military intervention in Iraq but has since become a vocal critic of the conflict. He won praise for a plan for peace in Iraq that would divide the country along ethnic lines.

Chief sponsor of a sweeping anti-crime bill that passed in 1994, Biden could help inoculate Obama from GOP criticism that he's soft on crime — a charge his campaign fears will drive a wedge between white voters and the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House.

So the question is whether Biden's depth counters Obama's inexperience — or highlights it?

After all, Biden is anything but a change agent, having been in office longer than half of all Americans have been alive. Longer than McCain.

And he talks too much.

On the same day he announced his second bid for the presidency, Biden found himself explaining why he had described Obama as "clean."

And there's the 2007 ABC interview in which Biden said he would stand by an earlier statement that Obama was not ready to serve as president.

It seems Obama is worried that some voters are starting to agree.

Source

I don't know much about Biden - here's a little write-up about him that I think is unbiased. For us who wonder who Senator Biden is:

Biden speaks — and speaks — his own mind By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 23, 4:54 AM ET

Barack Obama told everyone he wanted a running mate who will challenge his thinking, and now he's got one. Joe Biden's tendency to speak his own mind — and speak and speak — is entwined in his DNA.

The loquacious Delaware senator brings more than verbiage to Obama's side. Biden is a foreign policy heavyweight with a decade longer in the Senate than the seasoned Republican presidential candidate, John McCain. That's almost three more decades of experience than his new boss.

In Washington, Biden, 65, is known as a collegial figure even when he's competitive — one who can spin flowery praise one moment and biting fulmination the next.

His second presidential campaign faltered early on, just one of the Democrats shunted to the sidelines as the bracing contest between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton ****ed the air out of the rest of the field.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is one of the most influential foreign policy voices in Congress. An internationalist and strong supporter of the United Nations, he is a leading critic of what he sees as the vague, unilateralist approach of President Bush.

Biden voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq invasion, which Obama opposed from the start. Since then, he's become a firm critic of the conflict and pushed through a resolution last year declaring that Bush's troop increase — now considered a military success — was "not in the national interest."

One of the youngest politicians ever elected to the Senate — he was 29 — Biden entered the 1988 Democratic presidential primary promising to "rekindle the fire of idealism in our society." He reluctantly quit the race three months later after he was caught lifting lines from a speech by a British Labour Party leader.

In his latest effort, Biden proved to be a cheerful campaigner who mixed easily with voters, got along with rivals and displayed a self-deprecating sense of humor that leavened debates and speeches. When he was asked in one debate whether he's much too wordy, he drew laughs with a one-word answer, "No."

Obama jumped in to defend him on another occasion when he was asked if he had a problem with minorities.

The question was rooted in Biden's occasional gaffes. He had apologized earlier for describing Obama as "articulate" and "clean" in one unguarded episode that was taken by some to have a racial overtone. And he'd had to defend his remark that "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

Biden confronted tragedy five weeks after his first election. In 1972, his first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed when a tractor-trailer broad-sided her station wagon as she drove home with a family Christmas tree. His sons Beau and Hunt were badly hurt.

He was sworn in from the hospital bedside of one his sons and still won't work on Dec. 18, the date of the accident.

In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have a daughter, Ashley. Both of his sons are lawyers, and the elder son, Beau, was elected state attorney general of Delaware in November.

Biden himself had a close brush with death in February 1988, when he was hospitalized for two brain aneurysms. It was seven months before he could return to the Senate.

It's only August and the people are beginning to think right
Oops, I mean correctly. Same thing.

Another one. Obama-Osama is going down in flames.

Not to disrespect our current fine president. In this article it points out McCain's superior judgment of foreign leaders intent. Obama on the other hand is still trying to figure out who's side he wants to be on.

Russia Georia conflict

Funny Stuff Thread Still Alive! I Think???? . please Contribute. . My Source Having Tempory Difficulty's . Keep It Alive!