Even in its now defunct state, the McCain campaign is continuing its pattern of incompetence and disorganization.

This From a local Fox affiliate:

Private information at bargain prices.  It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

…We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.”  We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item?  Blackberry phones at $20 a piece.  There were only 10 left.  All of the batteries had died.  There were no chargers for sale.  But people were snatching them up.  So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee.  The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

Asked to comment on the matter, McCain campaign officials said this:

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said.  But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

I don’t think I could have possibly summed it up any better than that.

It never occurred to me that Barack Obama would have to surrender his Blackberry and give up email when he takes office. Given the way his campaign was run and the extent to which he himself uses technology day to day, I assumed that would continue in the White House. Surprisingly, nothing could be further from the truth.

American presidents are simply not allowed to use email or carry electronic devices such as cell phones or Blackberrys. The security risk is just too great. With today’s technology there’s just no way to be sure a president’s email is 100% secure. One of the things President Bush is looking forward to is sending emails again once he leaves office — as he hasn’t sent one in 8 years.

Even though President Obama isn’t gonna be firing off emails or blogging on MySpace, he will to his credit be the first President to use a laptop in the oval office.

As a certified Blackberry addict and Internet junkie myself, I cannot imagine being unplugged for years at a time.

-Chris Jones