"John McCain is aware of the Internet."
It comes from an unnamed McCain staffer who was defending John McCain on stage at one of the panels at the event today. Scoble, busy streaming to Qik, wasn't available by phone to give me the name of the fellow who actually said it, but it is indicative of an interesting dichotomy in our two main presumptive nominees for President this year (or at least a dichotomy that the mainstream and New Media is going to be painting for us soon, if they already haven't started).
That image is going to be John McCain: the aloof representative of a much older and outmoded generation. A generation that represents a certain amount of wisdom, but wisdom that no longer applies to our day and age. Contrasted with that will be Barack Obama: the clean, bright and fresh representative of hope and savvy from the new generation, plugged in with everything that is now with the answers to bring real change.
I don't know that it's a fair assessment. The problem is that I can see both sides of this situation here, and while the images that are likely to be painted of the two candidates are in no way fair to either's platform (no, not even Barack's platform). On the one hand, I've berated Barack Obama for not being as fully tech and social media savvy as his most ardent supporter still claim he is. I still believe that. In the same breath I've berated the Republican party for not even coming close to understanding the power of social media and the Web.
The real question is "How tech savvy do we need our president to be?" In that, we have to look at the many places technology intersects with government, and then evaluate what we'd like our policy to look like. There are many places on the web to do this, and I'm not going to go too far into analysis on that here but to say that there is not one presidential candidate from this campaign cycle on either side of the aisle who truly represents a tech savvy person unto themselves. Except for a few notable exceptions, they're almost all old white guys. Those that are exceptions to that generalizations have all spent time inside the theoretical "beltway," and are for the most part ingrained with the mindset of the typical Capitol Hill old white guy.
Let me put it another way. Do you think Barack Obama maintains his MySpace profile and answers his own tweets? Do you think he set up his own home DSL connection? Do you think he sits in the A/V room before major campaign events trying out different audio filters on his own voice to get the best resonance? Do you think he was on line to get the iPod 3G, Kindle, and Roku?