There will always be people who take great delight in the powerful betraying cluelessness over technology. When Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, was indicted last week on charges of filing false financial disclosures, the news was met with reminders that he once referred to the Internet as a “series of tubes.” Some mocked President Bush, too, when he referred to his using “the Google” and “the Internets.” Mr. Bush used to e-mail but gave it up when he became president because of concerns about security and a paper trail  the same things, presumably, a successor would consider.

In the rarefied context of the Oval Office, however, there can be great value in having a president who has an intuitive sense of how a technology works, said Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications entrepreneur and investor who wrote the recent book “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of how Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.”

“I don’t think it’s so much a question of what a president is doing today,” Mr. Wheeler said. “It’s a question of how responsive are you to the fact that there will be continuing technological change during your term.”

Mr. Wheeler, a supporter and fundraiser for Mr. McCain’s Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, said that Lincoln was the model of a president who embraced technology. Lincoln’s mastery of the telegraph machine not only put him well ahead of most of his constituents on the technology curve but also allowed him to speak directly to his generals and track their actions.

Lincoln gave a speech in 1860 that said the United States’ responsiveness to new technology was the chief virtue separating it from Europe. The speech begins, “All creation is a mine, and every man a miner.”

It’s no surprise that Mr. McCain  standard-bearer of the party of Lincoln  has moved to press delete on the notion that he is a Luddite.

“I do understand the importance of the computer,” Mr. McCain reassured in The San Francisco Chronicle last week. “I understand the importance of the blogs.” He said, “I am forcing myself  let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day.” But keeping up with technology “doesn’t mean that I have to e-mail people,” he said. “Now, I read e-mails.” The staff is “constantly showing them to me as the news breaks during the day.”