Vice President Al Gore is back in Tech Country, carrying a bouquet for the tech industry he has courted so avidly - an extension of federal R&D tax credits - and ready to plunge into another of his remarkable private meetings with the Silicon Valley elite.
The vice president toured Genentech's campus in South San Francisco on Thursday to dispense the good tax news, check out a company protein-manufacturing facility, and lead a discussion on innovation.
But today, behind closed doors, is the main event of the vice president's visit: a meeting in San Jose of his "Gore-Tech" circle of tech advisors. Begun a year ago, these sessions show that more than any other national political figure, Gore understands the US technology revolution and is alert to its importance for his future.
"Politics is like surfing," says Wade Randlett, Democratic political director for Silicon Valley's Technology Network political action committee. "You don't make the waves, you just look around and see what you can ride to shore. Al Gore has grabbed that wave, ridden it in, and is already on the sand with a pillow getting a tan."
The vice president is a genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his days as a futurist "Atari Democrat" in the House. Before computers were comprehensible, let alone sexy, the poker-faced Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues. In the Senate - the august body still fighting against use of laptops on the floor - Gore took time out from his environmental crusading to secure federal support for the Internet. Along the way, he coined (or at least lifted from a speech writer) the cliche "information superhighway."
As Geek Veep, Gore has poked into every hot issue facing the administration on the cyberfrontier: ecommerce, computers in schools, the Next-Generation Internet, the Human Genome Project, encryption, the R&D budget, Net "decency," FDA reform, bioethics, intellectual property rights, medical technologies, IT training, telecommunications policy, and public-service obligations for digital TV broadcasters.
But it would be a mistake to see the vice president's embrace of tech issues as simply an outgrowth of his personal fascination with science. Gore is in fact a committed ideologue with a political vision that drives all his policy initiatives, from "reinventing government" to embracing high-tech entrepreneurism. Gore's political passion is the pro-business, pro-growth, limited-government agenda of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that he helped found in 1985, and it dovetails neatly with what Gore perceives as the message of high technology.
In the DLC's view of the world, traditional Democratic constituencies - unions, ethnic minorities, New Deal and Great Society liberals - are being replaced by knowledge workers, free-trade global entrepreneurs, and 23-year-old corporate heavyweights. And the constituency that Gore believes will help him finally wrest control of his party from what remains of its left wing is a new generation of successful, business-oriented Democrats who are pro-choice, pro-environment, and anti-capital gains tax. Their message to voters: that the New Economy and Silicon Valley are the 21st-century metaphor for the American Dream.
Story lines
The old story: Silicon Valley is apathetic and apolitical.
The new story: The 1996 fight against Proposition 211, which would have made it easier for shareholders to sue high-tech executives, galvanized the Valley and made it a player in national politics.
The real story is more nuanced - Bill Clinton, after all, sought the Valley's support as early as 1992 - but it's true Gore's campaign for the hearts and minds of the digital nation began in earnest after the community flexed its muscle over Prop. 211 and helped the Democrats carry California. In the afterglow, as Clinton's second inaugural celebration proceeded last January, Gore sat down with a dozen tech CEOs.
"Gore was already deeply committed to their issues, intellectually interested in the technology, and he got it that this was a political constituency, not a trade group," recalls Tim Newell, former adviser to the White House chief of staff who set up the first Gore-Tech meetings. (Newell recently left Washington to become vice president for electronic commerce and Internet investment in the San Francisco investment banking firm Robertson Stephens.) "He took the executives very seriously. I believed they were natural allies, and once we got them in the room together they'd click."
Tina Nova, a biochemist and CEO of San Diego-based Nanogen, says she "was blown away" by that first meeting with Gore. The vice president, whom she describes as "a hunk - not cold or wooden at all," surprised her with the depth of his knowledge.
"I always believed that influence could be bought, that politicians promise more than they deliver, and that they're actors, not intellectuals," Nova says. "But that's not the case with Al Gore. He was on top of everything we talked about, from [attendee Kim Polese's] Java programming to [Nanogen's] use of genetic material for diagnostics."
The New-Economy Gospel
The leader of the delegation that day was John Doerr, the now-legendary Kleiner Perkins partner who quickly became Gore's closest adviser from the high-tech community. A relentless proselytizer for the New Economy and a networker armed with what one colleague calls "the best Rolodex in the Valley," Doerr enjoys extraordinary access and political influence. Last year, he reportedly slipped in to see Clinton during a meeting of the Group of Seven economic powers to ask the president to meet with his Silicon Valley friends. On another occasion, Doerr is said to have called Gore from the ski slopes in Aspen to demand and win reinstatement of a tech-friendly White House aide.
Doerr's enthusiasm for technology - and his track record as a creator of wealth - have led Gore to adopt almost wholesale the financier's New Economy gospel.
"The White House gets it now, absolutely," says Newell. "John [Doerr] and Brook [Kleiner Perkins partner Brook Byers] and Sandy [San Francisco investment banker Sanford Robertson], as well as a few of the younger CEOs - they're a brand name in Washington."
The ubiquity of the brand - usually mistakenly identified as TechNet, shorthand for the bipartisan PAC - and the high profile of the Gore-Doerr alliance have caused some grumbling among established industry trade association and Gore opponents who are unready to concede the high-tech franchise.
"He's developed a hard-core group of loyalists," admits TechNet's Republican political director, Dan Schnur, "but it's a pretty small group."
Another Kleiner Perkins partner, GOP-leaning Floyd Kvamme, concurs.
"It seems to be a tight-knit group of folks that Gore sees, just about 15 or 20 people, and he spends most of his time with that cadre," Kvamme points out. "Gore's positioning himself with a heavy Valley flavor, but not that many people here know what he's actually doing."
And even friends of the newcomers caution that there are limits to the alliance. "TechNet's people have a lot to say," comments high-tech lobbyist Tony Podesta, "but they don't control the switchboard. They don't run the network."
