When Al Gore appeared at a Tennessee event called Family Re-Union 6 last June, with Marimba's Kim Polese at his side to promote the family-friendly virtues of push media and the wholesome educational value of the Internet, he was staking out one of the most promising themes for his bid for president in 2000. The Gore campaign is not likely to be heavy on the details of encryption key recovery, the fine print on intellectual property and patent law, or any of the geek arcana that spells "boring" to voters.
"Politics is about attaching yourself to symbols," explains former White House advisor Tim Newell, who as one of the sharpest unofficial organizers for the coming campaign still helps put together Gore-Tech meetings for the vice president. "And what you have to understand is the symbolic importance of the [high-tech] industry. It represents the American Dream. When you can walk in and say here's a 30-year old CEO worth $50 million - that's what everyone wants their kids to be."
"Take a midlevel manager," continues Newell, "who's afraid and threatened by the New Economy. Then ask them what they want for their kids. It's computers. It's the future. They want tech because they have a sense that's how their kids can get ahead."
Gore's allies in the Democratic Leadership Council are convinced the vice president is just the man to navigate this uneasy gap between voters' infatuation with the future and their anxiety about it, and they're urging Gore to continue with his high-tech homilies. Ed Kilgore, political director at the council's think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, says the results of a new poll by presidential pollster Mark Penn show that Gore's New Economy speeches are right on target.
"There's a growing segment of the electorate that views technological change as positive," he says, "and younger voters see themselves benefiting from it."
Gore, he says, has seized on images that allow the Democrats, often skeptically viewed as defending entrenched interests, to "appear to welcome and shape rapid change." Although Kilgore acknowledges that an all-new economic future "is obviously a little threatening," he thinks Gore, like Clinton, can project a message of "safe change."
How long a boom?
Some observers wonder whether Gore's reliance on the most boosterish version of the New Economy message will rebound against him if the economy turns down.
Newell agrees that Gore is "strongly associated with the New Economy - that's good, and it's helped him. But if it crashes, he's going to crash too."
Both voters and the industry have some real concerns about the economy's direction. Already, according to state-by-state studies, marked growth in the high-tech sector correlates with increased income disparity, and in contrast to the postwar boom of the 1950s, overall wages since 1973 have been going up less than 1 percent a year. For their part, many New Economy executives have learned that even the most optimistic investors can get the shivers at the thought of the "Asian flu."
Laura D'Andrea Tyson, the former chief of the President's Council of Economic Advisors and head of the National Economic Council, now a professor of economics and business administration at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a distinction between "the political and economic definitions of the New Economy."
"I'm compelled by the notion that new technology is enabling us to change how things are produced and distributed and bought," she says. "In that sense, it's a revolution. But what I don't think we know at this point is if we're really in the middle of a structural change - we're unable to predict it."
The technological revolution, says Tyson, doesn't automatically provide a simple - if politically attractive - formula for an all-new, perpetually booming economy.
"Has the technology fundamentally reduced the volatility of the financial adjustments that cause business cycles? The answer is no," she says. "The same technologies which enabled huge flows of capital into foreign markets can make it flow out at breathtaking speed - the contagion is through the wires!"
Advises Tyson: "I think policymakers should have more caution, and try to make gradual changes."
The fund-raising factor
But abstract policy issues yield to more visceral concerns during a presidential campaign. Candidates can expect to be challenged on their sexual purity, patriotism, and religious faith for starters - and then to be hounded by accusations of money-grubbing.
Given Silicon Valley's legendary distaste for politicians - "Uh, uh, uh-oh, White House, black box, no good, abort" - as one DC consultant stutters, mocking high-tech CEOs attitude toward Washington - questions about the propriety of some of Gore's past fund-raising might be expected to sour would-be supporters from the industry. Inquiries last year disclosed Gore made 46 fund-raising phone calls from his White House office during the '96 campaign, and his fund-raising efforts at a Buddhist temple in Southern California were widely criticized as unseemly. .
As Gore and his team approach the next presidential election cycle, though, both Democrats and Republicans in the tech sphere are surprisingly unjudgmental about Gore's high-stakes arm-squeezing.
"Look," says the Technology Network political action committee's Democratic political director, Wade Randlett, "these CEOs are practical people. They understand the relationship between capital investment and productivity."
Randlett's Republican counterpart, Dan Schnur, is even more blunt. "It's what's expected of politicians," says Schnur, unperturbed."Birds fly, fish swim, and Gore raises money - that's all people think about it."
Gore, of course, cannot raise money for a presidential bid in 2000 until he announces his candidacy - at which time federal limits on contributions kick in. But he can continue to raise an even more important kind of political capital through favors to different sectors of the industry, friendship with well-placed individuals, and general burnishing of his good-science, future-friendly image. By helping biotech executives "reinvent" the Food and Drug Administration, trolling through John Doerr's Rolodex for potential dinner guests, or telling the media how much he regrets trading his Macintosh laptop for a boring old PC, Al Gore is campaigning hard.
Right now, the man who would be Technology President is laying the cable for a power-savvy, technologically hip, and thoroughly modern version of a political machine.
Randlett just laughs when he hears the word.
"It's not a machine," he says. "That's such an old-politics term. It's a network."
