Tech has put the McCain campaign on the defensive about whether a president needs to be actively engaged in the Internet to lead an increasingly wired country. At the tech-savvy Personal Democracy Forum conference in June, Mark Soohoo, McCain’s deputy e-campaign director, drew snickers when he desperately insisted, “You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country … John McCain is aware of the Internet.”

It has also brought up the unsavory topic of McCain’s age, with people wondering if his lack of technology skills is simply part of the “generational gap” between him and younger voters. But even in his own demographic — white, college-educated men over 65 — McCain is an outlier. According to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, approximately three-quarters of this group use the Internet. “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it,” said former Federal Communications Commission chairman and Obama supporter Reed Hundt.

One area being overlooked, however, is the need for progress on America’s technological infrastructure.

The United States currently sticks out globally for having no national broadband policy — a plan to give every American access to affordable high-speed Internet connections. Roughly half of the country’s households still lack broadband connections, and the United States continues to fall behind. “Broadband will soon be an indispensable communication technology affecting the way we learn, the way we work, and the way we communicate,” Charles Benton, chairman and CEO of the Benton Foundation, wrote in June. “However, at the dawn of this Digital Age, those who could benefit the most from this economically empowering technology are also those most likely to be left without access because of where they live or how much money they make.”

Science and technology certainly haven’t been priorities under the Bush administration. A 2005 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “The scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.” McCain has given little indication that he intends to be much different, and that has some tech experts worried.

“What concerns me is that [McCain] will do as George Bush did, which is to make technology an issue related to how he raises money to run the government or to fund campaigns, and not as an independent issue that is important to grow America,” said Stanford University professor and Internet expert Lawrence Lessig. “Technology for the Bush administration is a total non-issue, even though that was the thing that drove most growth in 1992 to 2003. And the reason I think he’d be led to that is because [he's] a guy who doesn’t understand anything about technology in the first place.”

McCain has not released a tech platform, although he may do so this week. On this front, he lags behind Barack Obama, who unveiled his last year. Mark Lloyd, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, pointed to the fact that some of McCain’s top advisors also advised Bush. “I think that the people who determine his tech policies, like [former FCC chairman] Michael Powell and a few others who were his top advisors, will talk, as Bush has talked about, getting advanced telecommunications services to all Americans,” said Lloyd. “But mainly their model is to allow the industry to determine what all this means, which is the danger.”

These worries aren’t unfounded. McCain has a long record of blocking progress on tech issues. He has served as a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation since coming to the Senate in 1987, and as chairman from 1997 to 2001, and again from 2003 to 2005. He oversaw the committee at a crucial point in history: the explosion of the Internet economy.

During McCain’s tenure, the committee oversaw the implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the first major overhaul of U.S. telecom law in nearly 62 years. McCain had to choose whether to be pro-competition or pro-big business. In most instances, he chose the latter route, by opposing increased Internet access for schools and libraries, backing large mergers to benefit the telecom industry and supporting a virtual system of haves and have-nots.

Lloyd said the Senate Commerce Committee during this time devoted “far too little oversight to the good things in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.” Those included “making sure there were equal opportunities to participate in the industry afforded to women and minorities and small businesses.” He added, “There was a rush to essentially allow industry players to get into each other’s businesses and consolidate in the industry.”

McCain’s long history in the Senate has one main theme: Government can do no good in telecom policy. “McCain is a pure free-market ideologue,” said Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America. “Their [Bush and McCain] belief is that government should just get out of the way and let the private sector do it. Clearly, in the financial markets, the private sector has done a horrible job.”

Other media experts have characterized McCain’s Commerce Committee tenure as a lost opportunity to make progress on telecommunications policy. “The thing that stands out for his entire tenure is that he has never had a priority, and has never had, to my knowledge, any accomplishment of any kind at all,” said Hundt.

McCain has said that closing the digital divide — the gap between people with access to digital technology and those without — is one of his top tech priorities. Speaking to the Consumer Federation of America in 2001, he said it was “our greatest challenge in the 21st century.” It may therefore be surprising to learn that McCain was one of the most vocal opponents of Education Rate (E-Rate), a program designed to provide discounts to schools and libraries to connect to the Internet.

E-rate, established as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, may have gotten off to a shaky start, but many tech experts agree that it has been a success. According to the Benton Foundation, nearly $19 billion in discounts have been provided to schools and libraries, and more than 90 percent of classrooms in rural, high-minority and low-income school districts now have Internet connections.

McCain opposed E-Rate in the late ’90s, concerned about the impact it might have on the telecom industry. He mostly cited concerns about government waste and “inflated” costs. Groups such as the American Library Association were so outraged that they encouraged their members to contact obstinate senators, including McCain.

Over the next few years, McCain shifted his views on the program. He instead focused on making schools and libraries set up a filtering system to keep children away from undesirable sites — a requirement opposed by libraries, school boards, civil libertarians, technology interests and even some conservatives.

“The prevention lies not in censoring what goes into the Internet,” said McCain of his Internet School Filtering Act in 1998, “but rather in filtering what comes out of it onto the computers our children use outside the home.” McCain’s position was so strict that even former Sen. Rick Santorum, a hard-line conservative, proposed a more moderate compromise bill.

In a 2000 Republican presidential debate, McCain had the gall to take credit for wiring schools, despite his opposition to E-Rate: “We took a major step forward when we decided to wire every school and library in America to the Internet. That’s a good program.”

Not only did McCain oppose E-Rate, but he fought tooth and nail against the entire Telecommunications Act of 1996. The bill wasn’t perfect, and has had a mixed record. As Lloyd noted, “Part of the concern was that there had been, frankly, too little debate about the act before the public, and that the broadcasters were getting extraordinary benefits without sufficient return to the public for what they were doing.”

McCain was one of just five senators to vote against the bill, arguing that it was too regulatory. In fact, a common theme of McCain’s views on tech policy is the belief that law can rarely be used to benefit telecommunications. Government intervention, for the most part, is bad. “Unless there is a clear-cut, unequivocal restraint of competition, the government should stay out of it,” McCain said in 2007. “These things will sort themselves out.”

At a 1999 Senate Commerce Committee hearing, McCain criticized the Telecommunications Act, arguing that it encouraged large mergers. “By redrawing the ownership and competition rules that govern the industry, it has created incentives, both intended and unintended, for companies to merge.” But McCain did little to stop them.

“McCain was encouraging the notion of competition, but really did very little to limit consolidation,” said Lloyd. Hundt added that McCain has “never successfully opposed any merger.” At a Federalist Society debate in June, Hundt also challenged Powell, a McCain supporter, to name one merger the senator has opposed since 1986. Frustrated, Powell replied, “Well, I’m not going to attempt to do that. I think it’s a cheeky argument.”

In 2003, McCain also voted against a bill that would have tightened media ownership rules — and, in theory, fostered more diverse voices — and introduced a bill limiting the FCC’s ability to regulate telecommunications takeovers. As Bloomberg’s Christopher Stern wrote recently, “McCain sees the Internet mainly as a business and trusts market forces to foster innovation for society’s benefit.”

(After trying to talk to several McCain campaign advisors, Salon was told to contact his Senate office for a response. McCain’s Senate office did not respond to repeated inquiries.)

More recently, McCain has sided with the telecom industry in the network neutrality debate. In 2006, consumer advocates supported legislation by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would have prevented broadband providers from creating a pay-for-play system. Telephone networks already operate on neutrality principles. Calls go through equally as well whether someone is calling her grandmother or Steve Jobs. But without net neutrality, say its advocates, the Internet would operate on a different model. Sites willing to pay large sums of money would be faster to access, generating more revenue for telecoms.

The CEOs of some of the world’s most innovative technology companies — including Google and Yahoo! — wrote the House Energy Committee in 2006, worried that the “longstanding openness of the Internet” was being threatened. (Ironically, Whitman, who was then heading eBay, also signed the letter.) They urged the committee to adopt net neutrality rules that were “both meaningful and readily enforceable.” Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog that endorsed both McCain and Obama in the primaries, called net neutrality “probably the most important issue in Silicon Valley.”

McCain sided against competition and opposed Markey’s legislation. In 2007, he argued, “When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.”

McCain has boasted that he has “never done any favors for anybody — lobbyist or special interest group — that’s a clear, 24-year record.”

But the record isn’t so clear. McCain’s chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee has been good for large corporations, and they have rewarded him handsomely. In 2000, Washington Internet Daily, a trade site, reported that McCain was the “[c]lear leader in fund-raising from high-tech companies.” Over those past two years, McCain collected $1.2 million from communications and electronics companies, including nearly $700,000 from phone companies and telecom infrastructure firms.

In 1998 and 1999, McCain wrote at least 15 letters to the FCC, urging members to take action on issues that had potentially major consequences for his campaign donors. For example, McCain wrote two letters in April and May 1999, asking the commission to make a decision on a $62 billion pending merger between telephone companies Ameritech and SBC Communications. The merger went through later that year. A few weeks before the April letter, Richard Notebaert, then head of Ameritech, co-hosted a fundraiser for McCain. He took in approximately $50,000. Just before the May letter, SBC and Ameritech officials contributed or solicited about $120,000 in donations for McCain’s campaign.

At the time of the merger, SBC was a client of Davis, Manafort and Freedman, a firm run by McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis. (Davis is now serving as McCain’s 2008 campaign manager.)

The current campaign cycle is also shaping up to be lucrative. U.S. Telecom Association president and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr., Sprint CEO Daniel R. Hesse, and Verizon chairman and CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg have each raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for McCain’s campaign. AT&T executive vice president for federal relations Timothy McKone has raised at least $500,000.

McCain has steadfastly resisted using the federal government’s power to ensure America’s technological advancement. But that approach will not work as other countries begin to outpace the United States.

When McCain took over his second tenure of the Senate Commerce Committee, the United States ranked fourth in broadband penetration, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In 2007, two years after he had given up that position, the United States had dropped to 15th in the world. The rest of the developed world, which chose to be pro-competition, is now racing ahead of the United States.

Americans don’t expect the next president to be Twitterer-in-chief, but he will need to lead an increasingly technologically savvy nation and ensure that the benefits of advanced telecommunications reach as many people as possible. “Government doesn’t need to manage the technological developments,” Hundt said at the June Federalist Society debate. “But it ought to establish a rule of law where entrepreneurs can raise money and enter these markets.”

Closing the digital divide and developing an equitable broadband strategy will be a significant challenge. Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America said McCain won’t be up to the task. “Nobody believes if McCain gets into office he’s going to fix federal communications policy,” he said. “He doesn’t have any credibility when it comes to [initiating] a government act. Obviously, he’s trading on the capital he built up when he was the straight-talk express. But that capital is dissipating very quickly.”

“I’m not ruling anything out,” Wurzelbacher told The Ticket in an interview Thursday. He added that he thought it was an “interesting idea” and that people have been asking him to run for office since he confronted Obama four years ago. He’s spent much of his time since then on the speaker’s circuit, he said, encouraging others to run for office.

“I like the idea of it — just regular Americans running. If a regular guy runs, right away the media’s going to attack him,” Wurzelbacher said. “What kind of education does he have? What does he know about this? My answer to that is, regular Americans aren’t experts, but dammit, look where the experts have gotten us. Maybe we need some regular guys in there. That’s what I’ve been doing the past two and a half years, just encouraging regular Americans to run. Tell the liberal media to go to hell and I don’t care what you guys say about me, I’m going to try to fix this country.”

Man, I hate it when people condescend to regular Americans! Especially when people like Joe the Plumber condescend to “regular Americans.” Regular Americans don’t have publicity agents, Joe!

The local Republican Party is begging Mr. The Plumber to enter the race, because while running against a 30-year veteran is usually a pointless task, a pseudo-celebrity candidate can at least make a game of it. Kaptur won with 60 percent of the vote in 2010 and 74 percent in 2008, though there’s a chance redistricting could make her vulnerable. (Kaptur also introduced a bill restoring Glass-Steagall! So basically I like her.)

Local Republicans say there’s about a 90 percent chance Joe will enter the race, at which point once again he will be asked questions on camera and he will say embarrassing things, like he did last time.

But as dumb and small-minded and tiresome as Joe the Plumber is, there’s no reason why he couldn’t be a congressman. Ben Quayle is!

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page takes a break from excusing the criminality of the executives in charge of its parent company to deliver an official house reaction to the developments in Tripoli that starts off cautious and then just descends right back into the exact same lame arguments it’s been using for the last six months:

Having helped to midwife the rebel advances with air power, intelligence and weapons, NATO will have some influence with the rebels in the days ahead. The shame is how much faster Gadhafi might have been defeated, how many fewer people might have been killed, and how much more influence the U.S. might now have, if America had led more forcefully from the beginning.

Planning for this moment is precisely why we and many others had urged the State Department to engage with the rebels from the earliest days of the revolt, but the U.S. was slow to do so and only formally recognized the opposition Transitional National Council in mid-July. The hesitation gave Gadhafi hope that he could hold out and force a stalemate.

Libyans will determine their own future, but the U.S. has a stake in showing the world that NATO’s intervention, however belated and ill-executed, succeeded in its goals of removing a dictator, saving lives, and promoting a new Libyan government that respects its people and doesn’t sponsor global terrorism.

I’m not sure how long the editors of the Wall Street Journal think your average revolution lasts, but assuming Gadhafi’s hold on power is as weak as it appears today, I would argue — as a layman, of course — that NATO’s intervention seems neither “belated” nor “ill-executed.” (I mean, it seems well-executed, in the sense that it seems to have accomplished its goal?)

But it’s the line about America leading “more forcefully from the beginning” that the neocons and GOP hawks will continue to cling to no matter what actually happens in Libya. It’s the same argument BFF Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham used in their joint response to this weekend’s developments: “Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.”

All-out war! From day one! With the full force of American airpower! One definite way to make a civil war faster and less bloody is for a foreign country to enter it fully, right? (It tends to unite the populace, for one thing!) And conflicts are always less bloody when America drops more American bombs. That’s how we won Vietnam!

There’s no point in countering McCain and the Journal’s arguments with reason, of course, because these are not actually fact-based responses to news, they’re just rote recitations of Republican dogma: Obama weak! (Except domestically, where he is an autocrat.)

And this is the “respectable” Republican talking point. The line from the real nuts — I’m guessing something along the lines of “radical Obama allows Muslim Brotherhood to seize control in Libya” — will begin bubbling up from the sewers to talk radio and Fox News and Michele Bachmann’s campaign soon enough.

“I believe that the planned drawdown is an unnecessary risk,” McCain, a Republican from Arizona, who claimed that no military leader has spoken in favor of the timetable.

Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine general expected to carry out the president’s drawdown order, has said the schedule is a bit more aggressive than the military had anticipated. Allen has cautioned that successfully winding down the war will require new progress on a wide front, including more help from allies and less Afghan corruption.

McCain — during a stop at the Kabul headquarters of the foreign military contingent, called the International Security Assistance Force — said he’s concerned there may not be enough American troops for a move from southern Afghanistan to the east to “finish the job there.” There are currently about 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan among a total international force of more than 132,000.

NATO has deployed the bulk of its forces to Helmand and Kandahar, two southern provinces where Afghan Taliban influence is strong, but international terrorist groups are less influential.

McCain said the drawdown will deprive NATO “to a significant degree” as it attempts to pacify eastern Afghanistan next summer.

Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, cited gains in Afghan security force recruitment and capability and said he was optimistic that native forces would soon be ready to take over security. But Graham also worried Obama’s withdrawal plan may reduce U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan too quickly.

“Withdrawal is what the enemy hopes to hear,” said Graham. “Our goal is to make sure that the enemy doesn’t hear withdrawal and the Afghan people don’t hear withdrawal.”

Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said it was important to reassure Afghans that they will continue to receive help long after the 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops.

“We’re certainly going to be here in great numbers until the end of 2014 and I hope as a result of a strategic long-term partnership with Afghanistan that we will have a military presence here and cooperation here with our Afghan partners for a long time after that,” said Lieberman.

The senators were skeptical about Western efforts to reach a negotiated peace with the Taliban’s leadership and suggested that political compromises with the insurgents could betray the Afghan people.

“I don’t think there will be serious negotiations with the Taliban until they are convinced that they cannot succeed in the attaining their goals through the force of arms on the battlefield,” said McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

Lieberman said that the Taliban would not seriously consider peace until coalition and Afghan forces “basically beat down and wear down the Taliban fighters and they lose their will increasingly and the leadership is isolated.” Lieberman called the idea that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, NATO leaders and insurgent commanders could talk out their differences at a peace conference “a dream, a fantasy.”

The senators’ harshest observations were reserved for Pakistan, home of many of the insurgent groups NATO forces are currently fighting in Afghanistan.

“There’s growing anger, it’s not just impatience, in the Congress of the United States toward Pakistan,” said Lieberman. “We want to have a good relationship with them but we’re tired of seeing them be both our allies and our enemies and supporting our enemies at the same time. They’ve got to decide to be our allies and we’ll be good allies to them, or we won’t.”

Shortly before the senators’ news conference in Kabul, an improvised bomb exploded on the other end of the capital, wounding three Afghan policemen, the Afghan Interior Ministry said. Insurgents have focused many of their attacks on Afghan security forces to undermine their development and NATO’s plans to transfer security operations to Afghan control.

As Salon’s Justin Elliott has pointed out, McCain’s “substantial evidence” has been hard to confirm — and last night, Jon Stewart tried to clear things up by interviewing the politician’s cranky puppet counterpart.

See the full clip here: