How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley

Rating:
Summary: No Merit
Review: I found this book to be "gossippy" with no merit on an interesting topic. What also bothered me was that this book obviously didn't have a real editor check it - names are spelled incorrectly, lots of misleading comments and plain old wrong facts, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Good but hope there is a sequal to get full picture
Review: In the early 1990s, Silicon Valley gave the world instant millionaires, who were also apolitical. That lack of interest changed by 1996 when Wade Randlett decided to form an action committee that supported new Democrats. HOW TO HACK A PARTY LINE is refreshing as it ignores the software side of the Valley. Instead, the tome chronicles the rising of political involvement by the Valley's previously aloof membership. The book is fascinating, similar to White's look at presidential elections, but is also disappointing because most readers will be interested in the .com community's relationship with the election of 2000 which is barely mentioned. Though well written and insightful, the Guttenberg speed of present day publishing costs Sara Miles a coup.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Good but hope there is a sequal to get full picture
Review: In the early 1990s, Silicon Valley gave the world instant millionaires, who were also apolitical. That lack of interest changed by 1996 when Wade Randlett decided to form an action committee that supported new Democrats. HOW TO HACK A PARTY LINE is refreshing as it ignores the software side of the Valley. Instead, the tome chronicles the rising of political involvement by the Valley's previously aloof membership. The book is fascinating, similar to White's look at presidential elections, but is also disappointing because most readers will be interested in the .com community's relationship with the election of 2000 which is barely mentioned. Though well written and insightful, the Guttenberg speed of present day publishing costs Sara Miles a coup.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: When worlds collide
Review: It's the late 90s, and Silicon Valley is overflowing with cash. A minor Democratic Party operative, Wade Randlett, realizes that the centrist CLinton-Gore New Democrat ideology is a perfect fit for the libertarian-leaning just-get-it-done millionaires of California's high tech industry -- and better yet, they're political virgins. If he can play the matchmaker between cash-rich techies and cash-hungry politicos, Randlett could leapfrog into Democratic Party power.

In this funny and ironic account, Sara Miles recounts what happened when Silicon Valley techies, who knew nothing about how politics works, met Washington politicians who knew nothing about high tech. The clash of styles is entertaining enough, but their attempts at communicating, while badly disguising their selfish agendas, are hilarious. Don't miss the scene where Tipper Gore sits in on drums at a high-tech fundraiser, or the scene where two busloads of congressmen visiting the Napa Valley sing drunkenly to each other over their cell phones. An engaging, insightful, well-reported document of how things get done, or don't.

Rating:
Summary: quixotic task
Review: Sara Miles is a San Francisco based journalist who has covered the nexus of politics and technology for the NY Times and Wired magazine. When her work in Silicon Valley brought her into contact with Wade Randlett, a manic Democratic fund raiser and self described passionate centrist, who had decided to make it his mission to bring together the New Democrats with the entrepreneurs of the New Economy, she recognized the makings of a good story.

I saw Wade Randlett as the guy who could be the pivot point for the major political realignment that was under way in the Democratic Party. He wasn't the most important figure in politics or high tech by any means, but he occupied an incredibly interesting position bridging the two. What Randlett represented was nothing as predictable as a political organization or a business entity; he articulated a political sensibility that was new, as yet uninstitutionalized, and utterly of the moment. His intelligence, his shrewdness, and his unfettered ambition made him someone well worth following. If the Democrats were going to be able to claim high tech as their own, and if Silicon Valley was going to choose the Democrats to represent its interests, I was sure Randlett would be there at the center of things. If I kept track of him, I thought, I'd be able to watch the connection happen.

Beginning in 1996 she followed Randlett as he embarked on his patently absurd quest, working through two successive trade associations--the California Technology Alliance and TechNet--to purchase Democratic loyalty with high tech money, and she put her access to good effect in this insider's account of the doomed courtship.

Why absurd ? Why doomed ? Well, Randlett's, and the author's. basic premise was that the election of Bill Clinton represented a genuine shift to the center by the Democratic Party, which with a little encouragement, mostly financial, might become the official party of the High Tech economy and, thereby, dominate American politics for a generation, in the same way that it had after FDR and the New Deal. They believed that :

The New Democrats who triumphed with Clinton in 1992 were a perfect match for entrepreneurs whose bedrock conviction was that the rules of the market guided all human endeavor. Silicon Valley businessmen acted as if they believed that money was the universal and only accurate standard of measurement in the world. They seemed to think that the question Does it maximize shareholder value ? meant the same thing as Is it morally right? Efficiency, in their world, had become worth; wealth was proof of rightness. And so the industry whose most influential spokesmen insisted that ideology was dead met the party whose President had no apparent ideology, a party that took their money and hailed them as the future.

Clinton's election in 1992 confirmed the DLC's [Democratic Leadership Council's] belief that its New Democratic politics were gaining ground--and that it was attracting a "core" of business support.

Some of their confusion, as expressed above, is understandable given the unique circumstances of the Clinton presidency, but the rest is a product of simple historical ignorance.

Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and subsequent election in 1992 were sufficiently remarkable that folks can be forgiven for misunderstanding them. After all, conventional wisdom by the late 1980's had determined that the Democrats were the institutional party of Congress, and that Republicans had a hammerlock on the Presidency. When Bill Clinton, a former head of the DLC, positioned himself as a New Democrat, ran against most of the Party's traditional constituencies, and actually won, it was possible to interpret his victory as a triumph for a new brand of Democratic politics, more conservative on social issues, especially crime, though still relatively pro-abortion, and more favorable to business and economic growth than the Party had been in the past.

Despite a lackluster or even incompetent cabinet overall (think Ron Brown, Henry Cisneros, Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, Mike Espy, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, etc.), he did surround himself with the most conservative group of economic advisors of any Democratic president : Lloyd Bentsen, the old Al Gore, Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, and Leon Panetta. In addition, he paid obeisance to Alan Greenspan, even though tight-money Federal Reserve chairmen have been historic whipping boys of the Democratic Party. Together, this group pushed him towards the right on spending issues and encouraged him to sign the two Reagan era free trade bills, NAFTA and GATT, which finally made it to fruition on his watch. Outwardly at least, one could argue that the potential existed then for a paradigm shift, with the Democrats, already closer to libertarianism than Republicans on social issues, now co-opting the GOP's more libertarian pro-business positions. This "new" politics of the Democrats might have been particular attractive to Silicon Valley's whiz kids, who tended towards a kind of libertarianism, which made them uncomfortable with the Republican Party's anti-abortion, anti-gay policies. The problem is that it was never a realistic platform for the Democrats to adopt, as soon became obvious.

Things began to unravel with the Health Care debacle. David Gergen argues, I think convincingly, that when the original Troopergate story broke Clinton was forced to yield control over Health Care to Hilary as a price for his infidelity. She steered the plan in the direction of old style Democratic politics and left him in the position of defending policies that ran counter to everything else he was trying to do. Republicans then draped the plan around his neck and, even more unbelievably than his winning the presidency, took over both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. the ranks of moderate Democrats were decimated because they came from swing districts which Republicans had carried. What remained of the Democrats was a rump party of the unreconstructed hard left, which Clinton wisely distanced himself from, at the behest of Dick Morris. This did suffice to win him another term, using Morris's strategy of triangulation to portray himself as the only man who could hold back the worst excesses of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Then came impeachment and the effective death of even Clinton as a "New Democrat." With only the Democrats in the House and political activists on television to defend him, Clinton was forced to curry favor with the Left wing (by then the only wing) of the Party. Once arguably moderate, he became an enemy of tax cuts, deregulation, school vouchers, partial privatization of Social Security, and other proposals of the Republican Party, most of which had been supported in a general way by New Democrats like Joe Lieberman. The Left saved his hide and he paid them back by accepting their agenda unquestioningly.

Any remaining illusions that the New Democrat ideology had a future in the Party were obliterated as first Al Gore and then Lieberman jettisoned every single moderate position they had ever held in order to hew as closely as possible to old Democrat positions. Al Gore's speech to the Democratic convention in 2000 was a virtual eulogy for moderate politics.

At first blush, it may appear that Randlett's original premise had some merit, but that unique events caught up to it; however, the truth is that the premise was false from the beginning. This is obvious by simple reference to the issues that Miles talks about throughout the book as being those which most concerned the folks in Silicon Valley. These issues include : low taxes, education reform, freedom from regulation, anti-union policies, protection from shareholder suits, H1-B visas for high tech workers from other nations, the right to hire the most qualified people for jobs, etc. In essence, they wanted the Democrats to help them defeat : unions, teachers, consumer groups, environmentalists, trial lawyers, and civil rights activists. Those groups are, of course, along with feminist/pro-abortion groups, the core constituencies of the Democratic party. It is patently ridiculous to think that under any circumstances the Party was going to take these groups on; the fact that Bill Clinton got himself in so much personal trouble that he was completely dependent on them for his survival only hastened an inevitable date with political reality.

In fact, there's already a group which represents the ideals that the DLC and other New Democrats were talking about in the mid-90's, the Republican Party. Earlier we quoted Miles to the effect that : "The New Democrats who triumphed with Clinton in 1992 were a perfect match for entrepreneurs whose bedrock conviction was that the rules of the market guided all human endeavor." Take out the words from "The" to "1992," and you can put in the word Republicans, without having to qualify it by year.

The main

Rating:
Summary: quixotic task
Review: Sara Miles is a San Francisco based journalist who has covered the nexus of politics and technology for the NY Times and Wired magazine. When her work in Silicon Valley brought her into contact with Wade Randlett, a manic Democratic fund raiser and self described passionate centrist, who had decided to make it his mission to bring together the New Democrats with the entrepreneurs of the New Economy, she recognized the makings of a good story.

I saw Wade Randlett as the guy who could be the pivot point for the major political realignment that was under way in the Democratic Party. He wasn't the most important figure in politics or high tech by any means, but he occupied an incredibly interesting position bridging the two. What Randlett represented was nothing as predictable as a political organization or a business entity; he articulated a political sensibility that was new, as yet uninstitutionalized, and utterly of the moment. His intelligence, his shrewdness, and his unfettered ambition made him someone well worth following. If the Democrats were going to be able to claim high tech as their own, and if Silicon Valley was going to choose the Democrats to represent its interests, I was sure Randlett would be there at the center of things. If I kept track of him, I thought, I'd be able to watch the connection happen.

Beginning in 1996 she followed Randlett as he embarked on his patently absurd quest, working through two successive trade associations--the California Technology Alliance and TechNet--to purchase Democratic loyalty with high tech money, and she put her access to good effect in this insider's account of the doomed courtship.

Why absurd ? Why doomed ? Well, Randlett's, and the author's. basic premise was that the election of Bill Clinton represented a genuine shift to the center by the Democratic Party, which with a little encouragement, mostly financial, might become the official party of the High Tech economy and, thereby, dominate American politics for a generation, in the same way that it had after FDR and the New Deal. They believed that :

The New Democrats who triumphed with Clinton in 1992 were a perfect match for entrepreneurs whose bedrock conviction was that the rules of the market guided all human endeavor. Silicon Valley businessmen acted as if they believed that money was the universal and only accurate standard of measurement in the world. They seemed to think that the question Does it maximize shareholder value ? meant the same thing as Is it morally right? Efficiency, in their world, had become worth; wealth was proof of rightness. And so the industry whose most influential spokesmen insisted that ideology was dead met the party whose President had no apparent ideology, a party that took their money and hailed them as the future.

Clinton's election in 1992 confirmed the DLC's [Democratic Leadership Council's] belief that its New Democratic politics were gaining ground--and that it was attracting a "core" of business support.

Some of their confusion, as expressed above, is understandable given the unique circumstances of the Clinton presidency, but the rest is a product of simple historical ignorance.

Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and subsequent election in 1992 were sufficiently remarkable that folks can be forgiven for misunderstanding them. After all, conventional wisdom by the late 1980's had determined that the Democrats were the institutional party of Congress, and that Republicans had a hammerlock on the Presidency. When Bill Clinton, a former head of the DLC, positioned himself as a New Democrat, ran against most of the Party's traditional constituencies, and actually won, it was possible to interpret his victory as a triumph for a new brand of Democratic politics, more conservative on social issues, especially crime, though still relatively pro-abortion, and more favorable to business and economic growth than the Party had been in the past.

Despite a lackluster or even incompetent cabinet overall (think Ron Brown, Henry Cisneros, Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, Mike Espy, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, etc.), he did surround himself with the most conservative group of economic advisors of any Democratic president : Lloyd Bentsen, the old Al Gore, Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, and Leon Panetta. In addition, he paid obeisance to Alan Greenspan, even though tight-money Federal Reserve chairmen have been historic whipping boys of the Democratic Party. Together, this group pushed him towards the right on spending issues and encouraged him to sign the two Reagan era free trade bills, NAFTA and GATT, which finally made it to fruition on his watch. Outwardly at least, one could argue that the potential existed then for a paradigm shift, with the Democrats, already closer to libertarianism than Republicans on social issues, now co-opting the GOP's more libertarian pro-business positions. This "new" politics of the Democrats might have been particular attractive to Silicon Valley's whiz kids, who tended towards a kind of libertarianism, which made them uncomfortable with the Republican Party's anti-abortion, anti-gay policies. The problem is that it was never a realistic platform for the Democrats to adopt, as soon became obvious.

Things began to unravel with the Health Care debacle. David Gergen argues, I think convincingly, that when the original Troopergate story broke Clinton was forced to yield control over Health Care to Hilary as a price for his infidelity. She steered the plan in the direction of old style Democratic politics and left him in the position of defending policies that ran counter to everything else he was trying to do. Republicans then draped the plan around his neck and, even more unbelievably than his winning the presidency, took over both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. the ranks of moderate Democrats were decimated because they came from swing districts which Republicans had carried. What remained of the Democrats was a rump party of the unreconstructed hard left, which Clinton wisely distanced himself from, at the behest of Dick Morris. This did suffice to win him another term, using Morris's strategy of triangulation to portray himself as the only man who could hold back the worst excesses of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Then came impeachment and the effective death of even Clinton as a "New Democrat." With only the Democrats in the House and political activists on television to defend him, Clinton was forced to curry favor with the Left wing (by then the only wing) of the Party. Once arguably moderate, he became an enemy of tax cuts, deregulation, school vouchers, partial privatization of Social Security, and other proposals of the Republican Party, most of which had been supported in a general way by New Democrats like Joe Lieberman. The Left saved his hide and he paid them back by accepting their agenda unquestioningly.

Any remaining illusions that the New Democrat ideology had a future in the Party were obliterated as first Al Gore and then Lieberman jettisoned every single moderate position they had ever held in order to hew as closely as possible to old Democrat positions. Al Gore's speech to the Democratic convention in 2000 was a virtual eulogy for moderate politics.

At first blush, it may appear that Randlett's original premise had some merit, but that unique events caught up to it; however, the truth is that the premise was false from the beginning. This is obvious by simple reference to the issues that Miles talks about throughout the book as being those which most concerned the folks in Silicon Valley. These issues include : low taxes, education reform, freedom from regulation, anti-union policies, protection from shareholder suits, H1-B visas for high tech workers from other nations, the right to hire the most qualified people for jobs, etc. In essence, they wanted the Democrats to help them defeat : unions, teachers, consumer groups, environmentalists, trial lawyers, and civil rights activists. Those groups are, of course, along with feminist/pro-abortion groups, the core constituencies of the Democratic party. It is patently ridiculous to think that under any circumstances the Party was going to take these groups on; the fact that Bill Clinton got himself in so much personal trouble that he was completely dependent on them for his survival only hastened an inevitable date with political reality.

In fact, there's already a group which represents the ideals that the DLC and other New Democrats were talking about in the mid-90's, the Republican Party. Earlier we quoted Miles to the effect that : "The New Democrats who triumphed with Clinton in 1992 were a perfect match for entrepreneurs whose bedrock conviction was that the rules of the market guided all human endeavor." Take out the words from "The" to "1992," and you can put in the word Republicans, without having to qualify it by year.

The main

Rating:
Summary: Insightful!
Review: Sara Miles unfolds a political saga as if it were a gripping novel. The story begins with political activist Wade Randlett, who forged a coalition of Silicon Valley’s leading tech CEOs and venture capitalists to support the New Democrats. Miles starts with Randlett’s arrival in the Valley. She shows how, in 1996, Randlett lined up Bill Clinton’s opposition to Proposition 211 (allowing uncapped suits against high-tech companies), helping to swing many apolitical or Republican tech leaders to the New Democrats. Miles traces the Valley’s growing relationship with Clinton, Gore and other New Dems, which held up until the rise of George W. Bush. Miles’ fascinating story may seem like ancient history (though it’s only 1996 to 2000) now that the dot-com storms have diluted the New Economy’s power. Otherwise, we at ... strongly recommend this intriguing look at a particular patch of political history, when the New Economy was strong, and everybody wanted to be a friend of the Valley.