I just came across this summary of the White House missing e-mail fiasco and I am pretty blown away at just how out of touch Washington is with technology. I knew that this administration was tech-phobic when Dick Cheney was asked as a Vice Presidential Candidate what Napster was and he didn’t know. And this was back when Napster was the "hot" software on the web.

Of course then there is President Bush saying he uses "The Google."

Before I get hate mail, I should say that I am a registered Republican (will that get me even more hate mail these days? 😉 )

Although I didn’t read the entire article as it is voluminous, I did get a chance to see that the White House’s IT practices border on the insane… Archiving via PST files that are ten times larger than is recommended is not smart.

They also seem to not know how much technology actually costs or perhaps vendors charge our government ten times more than they charge other companies. Either scenario scares me to death and it seems we will soon have a tax increase allowing the White House to buy more $50,000 server farms for a cool half a million.

I wonder if technology implementation happens from the top down. In other words do the President and Vice President’s knowledge (or lack thereof) of technology have a material impact on IT budgets and best practices?

Although it may be impossible to ascertain such details, reading about White House e-mail fiascos may make some lean more towards candidates that are more technologically savvy.

This should scare Republicans to death. At this point, perhaps as a bit of positive PR we could see John McCain utilizing social networking and web video more often in order to show he is "with it."