McCain

Apparently Jimmy Carter is significantly more tech-savvy than McCain, even though he is one of the few humans older than him. According to Hendrik Hertzberg:

McCain doesn’t even use a computer. Carter does, and how. He writes, he e-mails,
he surfs. He doesn’t have a blog of his own, as far as I know, but he reads
other people’s, and I’m guessing he spends more time at the keyboard than your
average Facebook member one-fourth his age. In Jonathan Demme’s
movie, Carter can be seen speed-typing on his Mac and grousing that his
inbox pileup is driving him nuts, or words to that effect.

This compares favorably with McCain’s statement that he depends on “Brooke and Mark” to show him his favorite blogs, which are Drudge, Politico and RealPolitics. We’ve noted this before, but it continues to be true that the first two aren’t blogs and the third doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists. (Could he mean this?)
To many people, McCain gets a pass because you don’t expect the oldest candidate in America to be particularly sharp with the post-1990 technology. McCain is older than at least 92% of the world, and he has already outlived the global life expectancy (to be fair, he wouldn’t hit the U.S. male life expectancy until the third year of his term). He’s older than the first modern computer. Of course, Jimmy Carter is older than the Turing machine, or, indeed, talkies. But he’s also a pretty smart guy. For instance, he has figured out how to divert Hannity-style attention from Obama and onto his own meaningless world travels instead. Is it really fair to compare McCain to a smart guy? His class rank at Annapolis says no.
But according to these guys, 70% of elderly computer owners get online at least sometimes. So we should be able to find a more apt comparison. Here’s one: My grandpa (a smart guy, but also just a regular guy). Let’s compare them in this handy chart:

Based on their familiarity with the dominant technology of the modern era, it looks like Grandpa Jack would be a better candidate for President than John McCain. Ha, but get this, one time a Democrat said he invented the Internet.

Younger than McCain

Someone else is already keeping track of things younger than McCain on an alright blog, so we won't be making that a recurring feature here. But I have been independently researching this topic at work, and some of the answers are astounding. Bebop, for instance, was born and petered out more or less between McCain's third and 24th birthdays. The Chaplin movie Modern Times came out after his birth. He was nine days younger than Wilt Chamberlain, who retired in the seventies and died in 1999. Every Disney animated feature, from Snow White on, is younger than McCain.
With this in mind, McCain's admitted ignorance of computers actually makes sense- any viable candidate would be younger than the computer as we know it today. But McCain is older than the bombe, the first modern computer, used to crack enigma machine messages from the Nazis, and he's about the same age as the Turing machine, the whole theory that led to the creation of computers. Granted, you'd expect someone born in 1895 to have figured out the car by 1966, but maybe not if he always had a chauffeur to do it for him.
In our next post, we'll compare the lives of McCain and another, younger famous American from his era.