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Who Invented the Blackberry?

By Brian Faughnan

With the Left eager to assert that John McCain has just claimed to have invented the Blackberry, it’s worthwhile to take a look at what was said:

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry. “He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

That quote may not be a modest one, but it’s a far cry from this:

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

So on one hand you have an aide saying that John McCain ‘helped create’ the innovation of telecommunications. On the other hand you have Gore himself saying ‘I took the initiative in creating the Internet.’ And whereas the McCain campaign immediately disavowed the comment as a staffer’s ‘boneheaded joke,’ there’s still a cottage industry on the internet in proving that Al Gore really did create the internet. The McCain/Blackberry gaffe will become the equivalent of the Gore/Internet claim the moment that McCain steps in to take credit for the Blackberry himself.

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