Last-Minute Push for Reluctant Technologists to Embrace, Evangelize Obama

Employees of some of the biggest tech firms in the United States are financially backing Barack Obama over John McCain by a lopsided ratio of nine to one, according to ZDNet's Robin Harris. Using fundraising data from OpenSecrets that covers donors who have contributed above $200, Harris found that employees of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Google and six other companies overwhelmingly support the Democratic nominee over his Republican counterpart. If you're Obama or a supporter, that 90% figure might seem like cause for celebration.

But you might also spot some room for improvement. Considering that Harris's list encompasses some fairly major companies that boast well-paid jobs, the raw numbers of donors aren't overly impressive; Harris cites just 170 contributors to Obama among Apple's ranks. Google finds itself home to 640 Obama contributors, Cisco, 240. Is there untapped potential for Obama in the tech world -- not only in dollars, but in enthusiasm?

The issues raised by that question are what's underlying Tech for Obama.

The Drupal-based site launched this week, and it aims to celebrate and disseminate what its founders see as Obama's impressive network-centric, tech-powered world view. The site is the brainchild of Peter Leyden, until recently the director of the New Politics Institute and before that the managing editor at the original Wired magazine. "There's no place on the web really that allows people involved, in the broadest sense, in technology," says Leyden, "to really make the case for Obama." That's an opening that Leyden and other familiar tech-world names -- open source leader Brian Behlendorf, longtime media technologist Deanna Zandt, Netroots Nation founder Gina Cooper -- hope Tech for Obama will fill.

In August, Leyden announced via blog post and email that he was leaving the helm of the NPI to take advantage of "the rare political opening," that he branded the Obama Moment. Now with Tech for Obama, Leyden and his co-founders make a fairly simple argument in favor of the Democratic ticket, calling it the only team on the ballot with the vision to leverage technology to bring about "a more innovative economy and democratized society." Leyden: "It's a very stark differences between Obama and McCain." He praises the Democrat for being extraordinarily "good" when it comes to issues of technology. "That's not fully understood within the tech community," says Leyden, "which is partially why we're doing this."

To that end, Tech for Obama features a comparison chart on the gamut of tech policy issues, from job-creating innovation and entrepreneurship to affordable broadband to the openness and neutrality of the Internet to how technology can increase government transparency. Elsewhere the site praises Obama's stances on media ownership diversity, as well as math and science education.

A second focus of the site, says Leyden, is to grease the wheels on letting those outside the tech world hear directly from techies that technology and innovation will be critically important to the economy in the days ahead. And so, endorsements from tech luminaries dot the site. In one such call out, Craiglist's Craig Newmark makes the argument "If you care about the Internet, Barack's the guy for you."

As for John McCain? Well, Leyden can hardly imagine someone "not being curious enough to check out the web and this thing called Google." That alone is a deal breaker, he says. "In my mind, and in the mind of a lot of tech savvy people, that is enough to disqualify you from overseeing the U.S. economy and being president."

For his part, Obama was curious enough about this thing called Google that after he visited the Googleplex out in Mountain View in 2004, he wrote about it glowingly in The Audacity of Hope. He described his amazement upon being shown a map displaying the world's Internet traffic: "The image was mesmerizing," wrote Obama, "more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men-nationality, race, religion, wealth-were rendered invisible and irrelevant."

Obama returned to Google last November. During his Candidates@Google session, Obama spoke with considerable passion about technology, particularly the possibilities brought by broadband Internet and the revolutionary potential of science. Giving the company the full Obama treatment, he spoke of both his journey and Google's as "something improbable." He effortlessly connected young state senator Obama to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their Stanford dorm-room days: "What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not top down." Googlers capable of swooning probably did so at that point.

To be sure, John McCain visited the Googleplex as well, in the spring of last year, for a public conversation with CEO Eric Schmidt. But it was, all seemed to agree, unfamiliar territory. One of the three fellow Annapolis alums who introduced McCain attempted to soften the audience for the candidate, saying, "I know that Google can be a strange place if you're a Naval Academy grad." The hour-long video of Obama's Google address has been view more than 329,000 times on YouTube -- nearly eight times the number of viewings of McCain's Google presentation.

Still, when it comes to YouTube views, both are beaten -- and fairly badly -- by Ron Paul, who spoke at the Googleplex last July. The video of Paul's visit has attracted a good deal more than half a million views. And that raises a perhaps uncomfortable question: how much tech world support can Obama (or McCain, for that matter) expect if, at least as far as convention wisdom goes, Silicon Valley is crawling with libertarians?

I gingerly put the question to Peter Leyden, and do so my deflecting the question with a classic "some people say..." approach. What, I asked him, do you make of Paulina Borshook's famous 1996 Mother Jones essay called "Cyberselfish," in which she paints technologists as "ravingly anti-government and tremendously opposed to regulation"? It's a "period piece," he says. "Tech people today get the we need, not no government policies, but the right government policies."

"Clearly Obama has them," says Leyden. "And McCain, well, he doesn't even understand the question. The choice," he says, "couldn't be more clear."