Just How Much Of A Change Are Our Change Candidates?

Do you get a letters from your colleagues, which are attached to emails, and think this attorney just does not get the technological advances.  You know what I am talking about.  They treat email like it is an envelope, but they still insist on dictating out their correspondence, having their secretary type it, then they proof it, have the secretary retype it, print it off on stationary, sign it, somehow scan it, and attach it to an email that says little more than "attached please find ... ".  And, more often than not the email is from the secretary.

Now maybe the proper term is paralegal or legal assistant, but given that these lawyers still wish to adhere to old practices, I thought I would apply the old term of secretary to their staff.

Do not tell my mother I told anybody.  She does not use email very much, but she had an AOL email account from which she emailed occasionally and to which I emailed things to her.  They moved to a different state.  I tried to email her and the email bounced back.  I called and found out she canceled her AOL email account and created a new AOL email account.  I asked her why and she said because she moved.  She thought because she changed addresses, she had to change email addresses, I guess.  Now, I do not hold that against her.  I love my mother.  She is not up on technology and she does not have to be.  She is comfortably retired and has been for years.

The other point is that my mother and these attorneys are not running for public office as a "change candidate".  They are not traveling about the country talking how they are going to leave the past behind and move the country into the future.  They are not advocating huge saving via the use of new technologies.

That would be our presidential candidates.  Sure they all have paid-for websites.  I am sure they spend lots of money on I.T.  But, what I find interesting is that neither Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain blog.  They have other people that do that for them.

Here is the point.  They each and every one complain that they are misunderstood, that the press does not cover some point, that they were taken out of context, that they want to communicate with the American people directly -- BUT THEY DO NOT DO THIS.  Because, to do this all they would have to do is TO BLOG!

Forget all of the fancy websites and expensive tech.  You really want to talk directly to the World, just open up a free or nearly free Typepad, Word Press, Blogger or some other account and posts what you think, how your day was, what you want to do.  Respond to a a few comments.  There would not be one newspaper, magazine, TV network, pundit, or political blogger that would not follow you, read you, or discuss your real conversation with the World.

Oh, I forget that you cannot do this because we might all learn that you really back FISA, believe in disproportional punishment, wish to continue paying government money to churches of which we do not approve, or that you really do want to stay in Iraq forever, or do not believe it is a bad thing to bomb Iran.  It might be discovered through the bits and pieces that you do not really represent a break from the old world politic in any real style or substance.

But, what it would mean is that you represent a powerful change about the old procedural ways of doing business and communicating with the people.  That would be revolutionary.

John McCain just uses his blog as a kind of new service.  It is more like Flickr than a blog.  Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton remind me of the old attorneys.  They seem to use the blog as an envelope where they (if true) dictate some comment out, have it typed, vetted, retyped, and then posted as a letter to a post by somebody else.

Can they not type?  (I am sorry, I mean keyboard)?

They have to formulate their positions anyway.  Why not just do it online.  You want to talk to the World directly, then do it.  Pull up that notebook computer and have at it.

I do not think one is better than the other in this regard, and that is my point.  How can you hope to change the World to that of the new century?  How can you reform, banking, oil trading, education, health care and coverage?  And, how can you change how a campaign is run in the new century if you cannot effectively utilize the cheap technologies that are before you?

The short answer is you cannot.  They all might be about change, but they are not willing, apart from the use of a cell phone possibly, to change.