Sunday, October 31, 2010

Instapundit worthy

Gearing up for Election Day, I thought I'd rerun my post that earned an Instapundit link four weeks ago.

Look at your keyboard and you'll know why President Obama has failed.
Your keyboard is the QWERTY keyboard, a legacy of the early typewriter, designed in the 1870s. We don't have typebars inside our computers to produce letters, but the QWERTY keyboard lives on.
Your grandmother or great-grandmother might not know how to operate a computer, but they would know how to type on one. The keyboard has basically been the same for 125 years.
President Obama rode high in 2008, promising "Hope and Change". Change ran into legacy systems. And legacy systems are winning.
How does QWERTY survive? Everyone who types knows it. They learned it when they were young. Once you've learned it, you barely have to think of it. It's natural.
Another keyboard system would bring tons of errors. The fastest typists would take lots longer to type until they learned it. And would be extremely unhappy at whoever forced them to change from what they learned and knew so well.
In his campaign, President Obama's rhetoric focused on the imagined "nefarious cabal" who led the country into the ditch. Change the leadership - to him - and the country would change.
He forgot the legacy systems. They stay not because of the decisions of a "nefarious cabal," but because they've worked for years. The newer alternatives can't overcome their problems. Instead, President Obama leads the "nefarious cabal" trying to disrupt everyone's life.
Think of all the things you remember from your childhood. Even if you're in your 70s, you remember plenty of what you learned in those early days.
You're comfortable with them. Even if you're a hunt-and-peck typist, you have a certain level of comfort with the QWERTY keyboard. Something new would disrupt you.
In the Oval Office, President Obama must use a QWERTY keyboard. He should look at it sometime.
Every day, thousands of journalists sit at their keyboards and write about politics. The reason for the Democrats' failures is right under their fingers.

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