Wednesday, September 24, 2008

McCain Can't Multi-task?

Obama called McCain and suggested that they get together and focus on the economy. McCain said okie-dokie, but then suggested that they delay this Friday's first debate.

Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

In this day and age, if you can't focus on multiple things at once, then you aren't going to connect with the rest of us who are. In this country we have many issues that are coming to a head at the same time: poor education, faltering economy, war in Iraq (Afganistan), immigration, senior entitlements, health care and more.

Two years ago, "TIME" magazine's Claudia Wallis wrote an article about the wired age. In it she states, "Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once. Mothers have done it since the hunter-gatherer era--picking berries while suckling an infant, stirring the pot with one eye on the toddler. Nor is electronic multitasking entirely new: we've been driving while listening to car radios since they became popular in the 1930s. But there is no doubt that the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers, when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season's finalists all at once."

Perhaps McCain needs to send Palin to the debate... after all, she needs to prove that she can run a family and attend to the needs of a country at the same time. Or is that attend to the needs of a family and run a country?

The "TIME" article continues, "That level of multiprocessing and interpersonal connectivity is now so commonplace that it's easy to forget how quickly it came about. Fifteen years ago, most home computers weren't even linked to the Internet. In 1990 the majority of adolescents responding to a survey done by Donald Roberts, a professor of communication at Stanford, said the one medium they couldn't live without was a radio/CD player. How quaint. In a 2004 follow-up, the computer won hands down."

At this point, McCain should know his agenda well enough to talk about it at any time and in any place. I'm tired of these so-called "debates" not really being a debate at all.

In the words of Mills Lane, "Let's get it on."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Funny you blog on this. I was annoyed in the fact that he's not the president so what's he gonna do about. GO DEBATE and TELL me what you would do about it! CHEAP EXCUSE!!!And as I watch the Debate - i am annoyed when they TALK at the same time - I can't hear EITHER of them! Grrr.