Title: White Collar Tech, Blue Silicon Valley
Presenter: Jeannette Estruth, Bard College and the Harvard Berkman Klein Center
Shortly after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president in 1993, Air Force One ascended the slate-grey January skies of Washington, D.C., and flew west for some California sunshine. After landing in the Bay Area, the Presidential Motorcade blazed toward Milpitas, where Clinton and his “technology czar,” Al Gore, visited local giant Silicon Graphics for a televised town hall meeting. Shortly thereafter, the Administration announced their new federal technology initiative. The initiative proposed 17 billion dollars of new investment in technological research, support for more industry alliances and public-private ventures, new national technological infrastructure projects, and critically, a permanent tax credit for corporate Research and Development. Clinton and Gore had stumped and fundraised throughout their 1992 presidential campaign to attract Silicon Valley donations and voters, and those supporters had indeed come out to support their ticket at the ballot box. When Clinton’s new tech initiative was announced immediately following the inauguration, the Administration both gained new supporters in the Valley, and cemented the support of recent acolytes. Clinton’s Sunbelt approachability, Boomer bona fides, and self-made mythology appealed to a rising cohort of Silicon Valley thought leaders and CEOs, and their politics, pulse, and newfound power appealed to him, too. Clinton’s active recruitment of previously regional Silicon Valley power brokers into the fabric of the national Democratic Party signaled the area’s rising political, cultural, and ideological prominence, as well as heralded a shift in national party politics. In the 1990s, the hippie- corporate culture of Silicon Valley assimilated seamlessly into the Democratic Party’s new self-conception. Previously “purple,” a hive of agricultural Republicans and Reagan Democrats, since 1992, the Silicon Valley has been a bulwark of Democratic Party support. In short, this paper will ask: how did the Silicon Valley become a stronghold of support for the American Democratic Party?
