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There
was a time in
Silicon Valley
when the political game was practically sneered upon.
The
corporate power players were too busy, too creative, too
darn smart to wallow around with those who were
practicing and perfecting the brutal sport of politics.
This was a meritocracy. The best ideas, the best
products, the best people would naturally rise to the
top. No help needed from lobbyists and such.
No more.
Silicon Valley
power players are politicians now. You would be forgiven
if, for the moment, you're thinking the valley's next
New Thing is going to be a governor. By my definition,
three of the five major announced gubernatorial
candidates are of
Silicon Valley
.
There's
Meg Whitman
, formerly of
eBay
, who looks at the
California
governor's office and sees a "Buy It Now" tag.
And there's Insurance Commissioner
Steve Poizner
, who helped put GPS in our cell phones, and is charting
his own course to the governor's mansion. And then
there's
Tom Campbell
, a former congressman, who is not a former tech exec,
but who did launch a political career with the backing
of the tech industry's biggest names.
And it's
not just governors who are in beta here. Consider former
Hewlett-Packard
CEO
Carly Fiorina
, who was briefly a key adviser to presidential
contender
John McCain
and is now leading the list of those who might take on
Democratic Sen.
Barbara Boxer
in 2010.
"I
think it's part of an evolutionary change," says
Larry Gerston
, a political science professor at
San Jose State University
.
An
evolution marked not just by the candidacies of the
three Republicans who will face each other and most
likely other big names in the
June 2010
gubernatorial primary. But an evolution powered also by
a number of steps that have been taken over the years
— trade groups, corporate lobbying operations in
Washington
and
Sacramento
, fundraising dinners big and small at high-tech honchos
homes.
It's easy
to forget it wasn't long ago that playing politics was
seen as a distraction in the valley. Gerston remembers
when he started at
San Jose State
in 1974, just three years after the microprocessor was
invented at
Intel
. The tech industry was in its childhood.
"These
companies, being small, concerned themselves with just
making payroll that week," he says. "They got
the product out. They were concerned about promoting the
product."
Politics
was somebody else's business. Government was irrelevant.
"We're
product-driven. We're R&D-driven," Gerston says
the thinking was well into the 1980s. "We will
compete to produce the best products and people will buy
them."
Politics,
it seemed, was something not discussed in polite
company. When I covered Campbell's first run for
Congress
20 years ago, I set about asking his big-name financial
backers —
David Packard
,
Bob Noyce
, Apple's
John Sculley
— why they were supporting the then-untested
candidate. They all declined to be interviewed. It was a
classic
Silicon Valley
endorsement — money talks so you don't have to.
But even
two decades ago, a gradual change was under way. Gerston
looks back to the 1978 founding of the
Santa Clara Valley Manufacturing Group
, an organization Packard promoted as a way for local
companies to push for common interests. The
organization, now the
Silicon Valley Leadership Group
, evolved into a force advocating for laws and policies
beneficial to its high-tech members.
High-tech
executives tested the political waters.
Ed Zschau
, who founded a
Milpitas
computer-equipment company, won a congressional seat in
1982.
Steve Westly
, formerly of
eBay
, was elected state controller in 2002.
"They
get it now," Gerston says. "They get it that
there is a connection between what they do, what they
need and what government provides."
Paul Saffo
, a futurist who's long studied the valley's culture,
says the valley's big move into politics in the 1990s
and this decade is all part of a region and an industry
growing up.
"Silicon
Valley 1.0 was all about changing the world with
technology first and with good works second," he
says. "And in
Silicon Valley
2.0, the two were in equal balance. And now it's Silicon
Valley 3.0: 'We can take the skills of Silicon Valley
and apply them to the larger social, political and
economic problems.' "
Saffo
sees the simultaneous candidacies of Whitman, Poizner
and Campbell as the rise of a new "geeky
pragmatism." Whether engineers or not, the three
come from a culture, Saffo argues, that embraces
practical solutions to complex problems.
It
strikes me that it's only natural the valley and the
tech industry that defines it would produce
personalities ready to run for office. This is a place
of big egos and can-do attitudes. It is a place that has
proved it can think different when it comes to life's
most vexing challenges. It's a networker's paradise. Oh,
and it's a place where corporate winners make buckets of
money, which doesn't hurt come campaign time.
This is
hardly the beginning of the valley's political
awakening, but let's hope it's the end of the thinking
that politics just doesn't play here.
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