Obama's Supermarket Scanner Moment

Tech-challenged Obama has trouble with iPhone:

On the campaign trail, President Obama is constantly talking about the importance of technology, but he met his match in an iPhone Sunday.

The president had stopped at a campaign office in Port St. Lucie, Fla., to thank volunteers. Then, for the cameras, Mr. Obama was supposed to call two campaign workers who were out working on his behalf.

But when White House trip director Marvin Nicholson handed the president his personal iPhone, Mr. Obama couldn’t get it to work. A reporter who witnessed the scene said the president looked “befuddled.”

“It’s not clear he knows how to dial on an iPhone,” the reporter wrote in a pool report.

Finally, Mr. Obama said, “Oh, I got to dial it in. Hold on, hold on. I can do this. See, I still have a BlackBerry.”

The president then “had a little more trouble dialing,” the pool report said.

The president then has more trouble dialing. When the call didn’t go through, he blamed Mr. Nicholson for having an insufficient cell phone plan.

This shouldn’t come as that much of a shock, considering that in May of 2010, Obama told the graduates of Virginia’s Hampton University:

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

Perhaps, for once, Mr. Obama was being honest about his technological limitations.

I don’t know how well he knows his way around an iPhone, but I know a president who wasn’t afraid to use his iPod on camera:

As Steve Green wrote in 2010, “They told me if I didn’t vote for Barack Obama, we’d end up with a techno-illiterate in the White House — and they were right!” — Steve really put the rhetorical dagger in — literally, the Joe Biden sense of the word, when he added, “PS Hey there, Mr. Supergenius President Sir? My four-year-old can work an iPod. Just sayin’.”

Update: “Somewhere, Rutherford B. Hayes is laughing.”

More: A reminder of one of Team Obama’s more infamous moments in 2008, as summarized by Moe Lane of Red State.org a few months ago:

In 2008 the Obama campaign released an ad that mocked John McCain for his inability to send an email – which infuriated people, because the reason why he can’t send an email is because his arms have never really worked properly after the North Vietnamese got done torturing him.  When Obama’s Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden dared mildly apologize for it, the Obama campaign humiliated Biden by having their lackey Bill Burton come out and retract Biden’s apology.

“Karma is a bitch,” Yehudit writes in the comments.