The 3 am call to the White House isn’t going to be over the Internet

So, enough with the jabs of McCain not being computer literate, says blogger Andrew Romano.

For one thing, McCain’s computer illiteracy doesn’t reflect a lack of curiosity–it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain’s job in the U.S. Senate–where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers–has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary). When aides are responding to your messages and briefing you on every imaginable subject, the incentive to get online sort of disappears.

Yes, it’s fun for whole hordes of people to make fun of McCain for the internet thing, but frankly, the above is true.

Furthermore, Romano says…

I spend about 10 hours a day blogging, Facebooking and researching politics online, and still I’d have nothing whatsoever to add to a White House task force on, say, social networking in the military.

Right on.

Finally, George W. Bush gave up email when he was elected in 2000. The reason? National security worries. What’s more, there’s no computer in the Oval Office, and the president can’t surf in the Executive Residence, either. McCain or Obama would certainly follow suit.

So let’s be honest here. Email and internet browsing eats up loads of time. And the president, and those who want to be, have far more important territory to navigate.