A Love Affair with Obama Cools, But Is It Over?
In one of the more surprising revelations to come out of Walter Isaacson’s new, best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs apparently told President Obama last year that he was “headed for a one-term presidency” if he didn’t adopt more business-friendly policies that would make the U.S. more competitive with China.
As news organizations glommed on to the juicy tidbit, Isaacson told the site Politico that any perceived animus between Jobs and Obama was becoming “overblown. [Jobs] was really into supporting Obama in 2012. …He wanted to make ads for Obama.”
Still, Joe Trippi, a political strategist who has advised John Edwards and Howard Dean, among other presidential hopefuls, thinks there could be an “opening” to steal Silicon Valley from Obama for “a [Republican] candidate who [is] bold and show[s] some leadership.”
Says Trippi, “You look at the problems of most of the Valley, and it’s a conundrum of how do you get the right talent — with education and immigration and visas being the way they are — and continue to innovate?” The Republicans “don’t have any answers on the visa stuff; they’re against it all,” he says. “Meanwhile, you have the president out there, banging away on millionaire and billionaire rhetoric. So I think it’s a very tough time for anybody in the Valley to look at any of these candidates and say: ‘That’s the one.’”
Such ambivalence marks a stunning reversal for Obama. Three years ago, many in Silicon Valley embraced Obama with the same fervor as a promising startup on the verge of going public. With the help of locals like Mark Gorenberg, a partner at Hummer Winblad, Obama mined the Valley for tens of millions of dollars, propelled in no small part by the campaign’s enthusiastic embrace of social media.
Today, the mood is much less buoyant. As one popular Web entrepreneur who asked not to be named told me, “My views are probably pretty consistent with many liberals and many people in San Francisco. I still recognize how impossible a job he inherited and how obstructionist the modern Republican Party has been. [But] I’m disappointed in Obama.”
The entrepreneur said he was “specifically disappointed that Obama has continued some of the Bush administration policies regarding civil liberties that I suspect are unconstitutional.” But some of Silicon Valley’s greatest concerns, like H-1B visas, climate legislation, and the miserable state of American education, also remain in limbo, making “Change We Can Believe In” frustratingly elusive.
Republicans, such as Bob Grady, formerly a longtime VC with The Carlyle Group and now managing director of Cheyenne Capital in Jackson Hole, Wyo., say Silicon Valley should be angry.
Grady calls Obama “an anti-growth president” who “has been a disaster for Silicon Valley.” In his view, Obama has “offered no strategy for supporting growth in the U.S. economy, instead offering [proposed] tax increases on both entrepreneurs and on venture capital and private equity general partners in the belief that redistribution is more important than growth.” He also thinks Obama has “done nothing to address the key to America’s capital markets crisis — the situation wherein access to the public capital markets for young, high-growth companies has been severely curtailed.”
Still, a lot will have to go wrong for Obama to lose the Valley vote. Josh Becker, who campaigned for Obama in 2008 and is now head of the analytics startup Lex Machina, says that while he’s aware of frustration centering on some of the Valley’s overlooked policy proposals, most of the people he knows are “still very excited. If you look at what Obama talks about — educating kids for jobs of the future and entrepreneurship — they’re messages that still very much resonate here.”
California has also been treacherous terrain for Republicans. Garry South, a political strategist based in Santa Monica, Calif., points out that “every politician beats a path to the doors of the geniuses in Silicon Valley to kiss their rings. But there isn’t a single Republican in Congress, the State Assembly, or Senate from the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley. That shows you that Democrats have a lock on the region.”
Trippi echoes South’s sentiments. “Will Obama win in Silicon Valley and California? Yes. Will it be as energized? No.”
“I do think there’s an opening [for a challenger],” Trippi adds. “But I don’t think anyone is going to walk through it.”
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Connie said on October 27, 2011
hi, all, i’d asked nvca mark heesen to share his specific thoughts on the obama administration as it relates to silicon valley yesterday. he weighed in last night en route to tel aviv. it was too late to include in this column, but here are heesen’s thoughts, via email:
“It can be argued that Obama won the election because he understood the power of technology and esp the internet where he raised huge amounts of money and brought folks into the political process who never participated. He understood that tech can help in the energy and healthcare arenas as well.
The biggest disappointment from the venture angle with the Obama administration is the basic disconnect between entrepreneurs and the tech they envision which Obama loves and the need to connect this to a funding mechanism. Once finance enters into the debate this Administration has consistently walked away from attempting to understand that folks like VCs are needed to bring these ideas to the next level. Its not only the carried interest issue, its also tax policy in general, FDA regulation, SBIR funding, encouraging a vibrant capital market.
The biggest issue that the Administration has not pursued and which is critical to Silicon Valley is legal immigration reform. The Administration has made a political decision (don’t alienate a key voting bloc: Hispanics) at the expense of job creation. Legal immigration reform does not cost the government money, will increase jobs, will help us in our relations with other countries, but this Administration will not separate legal from illegal immigration reform.”