IT-Savvy Presidential Hopefuls

Presidential hopefuls continue to come out of the woodwork. The latest isn't a huge surprise. Though he made no formal commitment, former House speaker New Gingrich said there was a good chance he would enter the race for the Republican nomination.

Let's be honest. The possibility of Gingrich as president will likely lead to some disgusted discussions around the water cooler. He has his share of adversaries. That said, from a technology (and channel) perspective, the man has been a staunch advocate for health care IT for some time now -- GovernmentVAR even covered him in January 2006 in "Newt's Call To Arms."

Let's explore what kind of tech know-how the various presidential candidates have. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, for example, oversaw Salomon Brothers' information systems before starting Bloomberg LP. North Carolina Democrat John Edwards touts a virtual campaign headquarters in Second Life. And Barack Obama has more than 100,000 MySpace friends as well as his own social networking community, My.BarackObama.com, that supporters can use to network and drive the campaign.

Then there's John McCain, who may not tout a lot of experience or knowledge of the IT world, but did prove he was a good sport when Google CEO's Eric Schmidt asked him, "How do you determine good ways of sorting 1 million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?" during a corporate sitdown. The presidential hopeful laughed, right along with the 1,000 Googlers in attendance.

Obviously, understanding the business of IT shouldn't be the biggest influencer determining who solution providers -- or anyone for that matter -- choose when casting votes in 2008. But it shouldn't be ignored either.