The Ipad Speech

I'm sure this is too facile, but I'm going to try it anyway: compare the Ipad rollout to the SOTU--the Obama rollout, I suppose I should call it, Obama 2.0.

Both appear, by almost any measure, to be credible efforts. They pleased a lot of people, and these people tell us that they augur great things to come. There was the inevitable nuttiness about the SOTU: "Comrade Obama's Speech to the Politburo," shrieked one blogger who thereby made it clear he hasn't the least idea what a politburo is. I didn't hear anything quite that loony about the Ipad, though maybe I just wasn't listening.

Yet in each case, am I wrong to divine a soupçon of oof--a bit of letdown, a sense that, oh well, that's nice, could have been a lot worse but--no Adobe? No camera? Don't I already own an Iphone?

You might not guess it but I'm still on board with Obama, specifically because the alternatives look so ludicrously awful. I'm willing to write off a lot of the first year disappointment as due to rookie errors--no, more precisely, I desperately want to write off a lot of the first year disappointment to rookie errors. The nightmare part of me fears that we are dealing here not with just rookie errors, but rather a more deepseated absence of knack. Other people are muttering unkind comparisons to Jimmy Carter. I'm just hoping we don't have an Apple III.