One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail
and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and
shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported
in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious. He
mostly relies on his wife and staff to show him e-mails and Web sites,
though he says he's getting up to speed.
"It's extraordinary," Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said, "that someone who
wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn't know how to
send an e-mail." For the record, President Clinton sent exactly two e-mails
while in office.
Besides, by this logic, Obama is even less qualified to be commander in
chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or
led men during wartime.
And if the Obama campaign didn't intend to mock a disabled veteran, what
does it say about his supposedly "cybersavvy" staffers that they don't know
how to conduct a five-minute Google search?
But the most revealing aspect of the ad is its target audience Obama has a
20- to 30-point advantage over McCain among 18- to 29-year-olds. Indeed, his
base (not counting black voters) is upscale college kids and new-economy
young voters. They may think being able to send an e-mail is, like, totally
crucial.
The only other constituency - other than the press - that will be jazzed by
such an attack are the Web-symbiotes of the left-wing netroots, another
demographic Obama has locked up.
But older Americans, working-class Americans, veterans and other voters
Obama desperately needs probably won't care and might even take offense at
Obama's condescension and insensitivity.
There are two explanations for the ad. One is that Obama released it to
reassure his base that he's serious about attacking McCain, not to win over
swing voters. That, or the campaign actually thinks it's an effective ad.
Either way, the lesson is the same: Obama doesn't know how to get outside
his echo chamber. He talks about being bipartisan to hard-core liberals who
like the words, but he rejects actual deviation from the liberal line. He
talks about new ideas while repackaging old ones.
He is a candidate who has never had to sell himself to voters who weren't
already sold. And it shows.