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“Considering Arcane Lame McCain couldn’t spell CPU if you spotted him the C and the P, they could have used a dial-up modem and smoked him.”

This is a Forbes article from 2000
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/0529/053_print.html

“In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.”

“Ultimately, McCain realized he couldn’t go the distance, but the message was clear to any political organization with hopes for the future. His Web team had played the Internet like a Stradivari. Ballot petitioning was simplified. Local email brought out large crowds on a few hours’ notice. The Web was used to enlist phone bankers from all over the country to download voter lists in upcoming primary states and then to make calls from their homes. Hundreds of thousands were reached at virtually no cost, compared to the going rate of 50 cents for every call from a professional phone bank. The Web became a virtual political print shop enabling thousands of volunteers to download and reproduce millions of pieces of campaign literature and signs on their home printers. The various pages on McCain’s Web site were used to put out key registration information and to douse political fires.

According to Wes Gullett, McCain’s deputy campaign manager, the Internet was “everything—the only way we could have survived.” Time and again, Gullett was stunned by the power of the new kind of interactive campaign being created as they went along. “I had 2,500 volunteers in Arizona alone,” he says. “We had a headquarters full of people who knew about the campaign from the Internet.”

The campaign’s innovative use of the Internet could turn out to be the most important single factor of this year’s election. And woe unto the future candidate who doesn’t study the McCain 2000 Internet campaign strategy carefully. “The Web was only an electronic billboard in the last two elections,” Max Fose says, “but this is the first time anyone ran a truly interactive campaign.” It certainly will not be the last.”