When George W. Bush sits down with over a dozen technology leaders on Thursday, he'll be in the company of friends and allies.
The two-day economic forum in Austin, Texas, is intended to highlight the president-elect's plans for avoiding a further market downturn, such as his suggested $1.3 trillion tax cut and his support for fewer regulations and trade restrictions.
Those proposals are sure to be met with applause from the 15 technology executives who are scheduled to attend the forum. All but one are Bush enthusiasts who lent political or financial support to his bid for the presidency.
Among the attendees: Michael Dell of Dell Computer, Craig Barrett of Intel, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, Lou Gerstner of IBM, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Len Pomata of Oracle, and Floyd Kvamme of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers.
The only participant who did not contribute to Bush's campaign or to Republican causes last year is Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett Packard.
The rest of the CEOs are members of Bush's Information Technology Advisory Council (ITAC), which the Texas governor formed in July 1999 to provide him with advice on tech issues -- and campaign contributions.
IBM's Gerstner does not appear to have been a member, but he wrote checks overwhelmingly to Republican candidates during the last two years.
Of course, not all technology execs backed Bush during the campaign. As the November election date neared, both campaigns released lists of hundreds of executives who had endorsed them.
Industry leaders such as Loud Cloud's Marc Andreessen, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, Kim Polese of Marimba, and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson met frequently with Vice President Al Gore. John Doerr and Bill Joy wrote op-eds supporting the Democratic candidate.
And -- no surprise here -- not one of them is scheduled to be at the Austin confab.
Also conspicuous by his absence was Microsoft exec Bob Herbold, a highly visible member of Bush's ITAC. A Republican source close to the Bush transition said Herbold's appearance might look inappropriate because of the ongoing antitrust suit against Microsoft, which Bush has mildly criticized in the past.
Many of the ITAC members who will be at the meeting were generous with their pocketbooks.
Jim Barksdale, for instance, gave $145,000 to the Republican Party, $75,000 to the Republican Senate campaign committee and tens of thousands in assorted contributions to other GOP causes.
Cisco CEO John Chambers also became a top contributor to the Republican Party, giving approximately $500,000 of his own money to the party and its candidates, according to FEC records. A GOP fundraiser, held at his home, netted a Silicon Valley record of $4 million.
As the summit opened Wednesday, with a meeting of about 40 traditional firms such as Aurora Capital Partners and Credit Suisse First Boston, Bush applauded the Federal Reserve Board's decision to lower short-term interest rates, which sent the stock market sharply upward.
Several ITAC members also figure prominently in the list of transition team leaders chosen by Bush to oversee the presidential handoff.
Click Action's Greg Slayton is on the Commerce Department advisory team, and Cisco's Chambers is on the Education Department's team. Chambers has been a supporter of education reform in California and backed the Proposition 39 plan to ease approval for local school-construction bonds.
An analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics says that the 474 people who are transition advisors gave over $5.6 million to federal candidates and party committees during the last election cycle. Of that total, $5.3 million went to Republican causes and candidates.
