ALTER: Are McCain's War Wounds Really to Blame for His 'Computer Illiteracy'?

Last Friday, I posted an item called "Obama Plays the Age Card (Again)" that was critical of Chicago's efforts to portray McCain as unfit to occupy the Oval Office simply because he's not yet a fluent computer user. As I wrote at the time, the Obama camp's "Still" ad exaggerated some of McCain's past statements and ignored others in a subtle attempt to paint the Arizona senator as not only "out of touch" but senile. In an update added later that day, I noted that there might be another reason--beside incuriosity--why McCain isn't yet maintaining his own MySpace page: his war wounds. In 2000, the Boston Globe reported that "McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes," while Forbes Magazine later added that even though "McCain is an inveterate devotee of email" who is "regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist," "the injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type" so "instead he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop." Now my NEWSWEEK colleague Jonathan Alter asks an important question: if McCain's war wounds are really to blame for his computer "illiteracy," why didn't anyone on the campaign say so? His report:

On June 16, I spoke at length with Mark Salter on the subject of McCain and the computer. He said McCain had a PC on his desk and often borrowed the BlackBerrys of others and was working at getting better on the computer. The point he was making was that McCain misspoke when he said he was "computer illiterate" in January in an interview with YahooNews. At no time did Salter say that McCain's war wounds, which mostly prevent him from lifting his arms above his head, had any connection to his slowness at adapting to the computer. You can be sure that if this were a factor, Salter would have mentioned it.

When McCain returned from Vietnam, his service in the Navy required him to type reports. There is nothing in any of the medical records released by the McCain campaign that suggests in any way that McCain had trouble typing.

The McCain campaign should release any such records if they exist. Otherwise, McCain's campaign should be asked why it would attempt to exploit the senator's genuine suffering during the Vietnam War to protect McCain from an embarrassing charge related to his inexperience with computers.