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How to Hack a Party Line
The Democrats and Silicon Valley
By Sara Miles Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2001 Sara Miles
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9424-2
CHAPTER 1
It was a perfect California morning in the fall of 1996, with the radio reporting a warm front and a hot market, and Wade Randlett was driving fast down Highway 280 toward Silicon Valley, laughing into a cell phone. With his wire-rimmed shades and suspenders, the dark-haired thirty-one-year-old could pass for a successful investment banker, except that he seemed to be having too much fun.
At Sand Hill Road, tires squealing, Randlett turned and raced his black Audi coupe up the landscaped driveway leading to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture-capital firm.
The car phone rang again. Randlett slowed to forty-five. It was the White House. "I'll call you back," he said, casually.
* * *
I'd met Wade Randlett in July 1996, after months of pointless phone calls to various highly paid press secretaries and officials at the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton-Gore election campaign, and the California Democratic campaign headquarters. They were polite when I asked who was in charge of organizing the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley for Clinton — "You know, computers, the Internet," I'd say helpfully. "Who's working on that?" — but none of the professional Democrats had a clue. Finally, an embittered union rep I'd met at a party told me about Wade Randlett, a fund-raiser and campaign consultant she thought was connected. "He's one of those right-wing New Democrat boys," she said, her voice dripping with distaste. "Young, arrogant, hates unions, loves rich people. He'll probably know."
Randlett was working out of his home, a small stucco in a pleasantly suburban part of San Francisco, across the street from a parochial school. A Great Dane the size of a sofa got to the door first, but Randlett reached a hand around and greeted me without interrupting his phone conversation. "We've got a twelve-couple that night at fifty a couple," he went on, motioning me in. "Breakfast, no press." A dining-room table was piled high with towers of paper, files, and newspapers, a fax machine in the corner was spewing out documents, and there was a row of Styrofoam coffee cups adorning the mantel. Randlett was typing something into his notebook computer as he talked, and trying to ignore the other ringing phone. The dog lay down. Apart from a suit jacket draped over a chair and a strangely formal glass bookcase holding two framed photos and a dusty bottle of wine, there were no personal effects. The place looked as if someone had just moved in, or out. It looked like the desolate post-divorce wreck of someone who had married too young. It looked like a campaign.
Wade Randlett was a ridiculously handsome man. Tall and deep-voiced, with impeccable public manners and ruthless backroom savvy, he seemed almost physically propelled by ambition. In his early twenties, much as less imaginative members of his generation had taken up extreme sports, Randlett had hurled himself into politics. Now he was playing in the big leagues, building Silicon Valley's first political machine, and years of ferocious intensity and practice were paying off.
I liked Randlett, almost as much as I found him appalling. He had a great laugh grafted over a bottomless capacity for conspiracy. Randlett's personality reflected what I thought of as some of the worst traits of politics and of Silicon Valley combined — aggression, arrogance, and ambition — yet he was neither venal nor dishonest. He was personally generous, professionally cutthroat, and had a wholehearted, contagious enthusiasm for his work. "Hop in," he'd say to me, handing me a cold drink and opening the door to his Audi. "Let's drive down to Palo Alto, and I'll fill you in on the story."
Reared in Danville, one of the whitest, wealthiest, and most Republican strongholds of the San Francisco Bay Area, Randlett had set off for Princeton in the early eighties without any particular signs of political ambition. He carried the usual badges of affluence — good teeth, excellent schooling, and a few perfect navy-blue suits — and an unshakable confidence in his own abilities. The country was in the middle of the Reagan years, and Randlett rejected Reagan Republicanism with a visceral distaste. "First there was their social outlook: Let's all go back to 1952," he said, summing up Reagan's Morning in America vision. "Then there was their idea of economics: screw the environment, don't invest in education, let business do whatever it likes and piss on the rest." And though he had even less patience for "politically correct leftist whiners," Randlett became a vocal pro-choice Democratic activist on campus and a defender of individual liberties.
In 1987, Randlett returned to the Bay Area to earn a law degree, but the life of an upscale lawyer struck him as a fundamental waste of time. "Everyone I knew was a lawyer," he said dismissively. Instead he went to work for George Marcus, a wealthy Greek-American real-estate developer in San Jose and a prominent Northern California fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. Marcus would, in the next decade, become chairman of the largest investment-real-estate brokerage firm in the country, and one of Silicon Valley's top ten political donors. "I was as low as lowly gets, just hanging around and trying to see what I could learn," Randlett said, trying to sound modest. "I made ten thousand cold calls my first year."
Before long, Randlett had set up shop as an independent fund-raiser and political consultant, working out of San Jose and hustling for stalwarts of the California Democratic Party like Dianne Feinstein, John Garamendi, Zoe Lofgren, and Art Torres. For nearly a decade, Randlett practiced the art of campaign fund-raising, developing a remarkable talent for getting complete strangers to write him checks for $50,000. He understood as well as anyone the nuances of the personal check, the corporate check, the check that was in the mail. He knew how to cold-call, how to bid a donor up, how to make one gift the occasion for the next. "I'm talking money," he'd say happily as he opened the envelopes. "Money, money, money, money, money."
Randlett's fund-raising style relied heavily on the extraordinarily effective, if contradictory, mélange of class cues he exuded. He could use his prep-school manners and hand-sewn loafers to make his utter lack of embarrassment about asking for money seem clubbily upper-class, then switch in a heartbeat to flawless middle-American male jocularity, pitching as relentlessly as a salesman with a quota to fill.
Randlett had come of political age at a moment when money's rule over politics was a given, a matter of fact — not a trend to be deplored with high-minded whining about the corruption of civic values. Laments about campaign finance were tacky and old-fashioned, Randlett felt, and he affected a blunt, contemporary realism about the way the system worked.
"Money, money, money, money," he repeated. "If you don't understand it, it looks corrupt. But if you like someone, and they like you, there's nothing wrong with giving them money. It gets a conversation started."
Skilled as he was at the task, though, Randlett was too ambitious to spend his life dialing for dollars. Fund-raising occupied an odd position in the hierarchy of political parties: the work was both crass and essential. Good fund-raisers stitched together the networks that would support a campaign, set the candidate's schedule and priorities, learned everyone's secrets, and kept the whole enterprise afloat. In return, they were courted assiduously, rewarded handsomely, and regularly condescended to by snotty twenty-four-year-old political staffers. Like pollsters, fund-raisers earned a lot of money. But they were not supposed to engage in "real" politics themselves: they were considered technicians, rather than thinkers, and were expected to know their place.
Not that Randlett tried to present himself as a thinker; he was way too shrewd for that. Policy guys were even more marginal than fundraisers when it came to real politics; in a campaign, being tagged as an intellectual was the kiss of death. Unlike a lot of young political operatives, Randlett resisted the urge to craft complicated, subtle arguments in order to show off his intelligence. "That's just dumb," he'd say instead, airily, dismissing an opponent's carefully worked out thesis, or "Everyone knows that's stupid. It's bad. It sucks." As a rule, he tried to sound uninterested in the fine points of policy debates. He usually won them.
What Wade Randlett did want, badly, was power. He wanted to be able to promote his ideas about politics, to make things happen in the Democratic Party, and to affect the country at large. His ideology was centrism, and he argued for it with the intensity of an evangelical. "You're making a big mistake if you think moderates feel moderately about politics," Randlett said. "I am passionately centrist. Goddamn it, I believe in the center."
Randlett had stayed liberal on social issues like abortion and gun control, while staking out a pro-capitalist, antiunion stand on business and economic issues. Like many of his contemporaries who hailed a moderate "Third Way," eschewing both boomer liberalism and rigid conservatism, Randlett was a devoted Democrat. Like them, he took pains to identify himself, though, as a "New Democrat," which meant that he was intent on steering the Democratic Party away from "failed socialist experiments," such as the New Deal or the Great Society, that tried to redistribute wealth and regulate business.
Randlett was contemptuous of the angry moralizing of right-wing Republicans whose political agenda centered around such narrow issues as homosexuality, school prayer, and the right to life. Democratic moderates, he felt, were the only hope for the country. "The left lost," he liked to point out. "They're history. The conservatives hate the modern world. I'm a real progressive, because I'm the only one who believes in the future."
Randlett also believed in winning. As a political fund-raiser and consultant to candidates, he wanted to steer Democrats toward the center because it would increase their chances of victory. As he saw it, liberalism was responsible for the Democrats' defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan; liberalism was what had turned ordinary voters away from Democrats; and liberalism was why businesspeople mistrusted his party. The Democrats had become a minority party, he felt, because they had failed to recognize that the overall sentiment of voters in the mid-1990s was centrist, not liberal or extreme right-wing. In California, his moderate candidates, like Zoe Lofgren, had won. Success for the Democratic Party nationally, Randlett was convinced, lay in electing moderate New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore — pro-business politicians with mainstream social values and excellent marketing skills.
Like most campaign professionals, Randlett saw little percentage in spending time or money courting partisan true believers. Both Democratic "Jesse Jackson lefties" and Republican "Bible-thumpers," he argued, were a minority within their parties, and, despite their grumbling, the least likely to jump ship in a general election. At the end of the day, labor would always vote Democratic; NRA activists would stick with the Republicans. A winning strategy had to target less ideological, more moderate voters — the great majority of the electorate — even if these swing voters were, by definition, not as interested in politics as the hard-core base. Randlett was determined to push his party in the direction he knew it should go. "Whoever gets to the center faster," he said flatly, "wins."
* * *
To party regulars in the mid-1990s, the raw, ugly suburbs of San Jose must have seemed an unlikely launching pad for a young man with political ambitions. "Nobody out here has ever related much to government," explained Larry Stone, a genial real-estate developer and the former Democratic mayor of Sunnyvale. "It's a little hard to care about politics when you're starting up a company and sleeping under your desk."
Randlett hadn't even tried, at first, to look for campaign contributions under those desks: like all the other Valley fund-raisers working on California campaigns, he depended on old Palo Alto families, Atherton's horsey rich, and a handful of real-estate moguls to bring in dollars for his candidates. Yet he watched, closely, studying the rapidly growing high-tech industry from his hole of an office in San Jose. Something was happening here, something that was going to change not only the way America did business but the way it did politics, and Randlett knew that he wanted to be a part of it.
The effects of the Internet explosion hadn't yet rippled out through the country, burnishing the entire economy to a high gloss, but the Valley itself — usually defined as Santa Clara County, though sometimes including parts of San Francisco and Alameda counties — was definitely booming. Years of government investment in R&D and of defense spending, combined with Stanford University's excellent science and engineering programs, had helped create a climate in which engineers could flourish. Earlier breakthroughs in microprocessors and personal computers had given the region a base level of wealth, and established a culture where technical innovation and business daring were valued above all. But now a new phase was under way.
According to Joint Ventures Silicon Valley, a collaborative business-government research institute that tracked indicators of the region's economy and quality of life, the numbers were staggering. From 1992 to 1996 alone, the Valley gained 3,100 new businesses, 230,000 new jobs, and attracted $2.7 billion of venture capital into its businesses. In August 1995, Netscape went public, with an IPO that took its value from nothing to $2.2 billion overnight, and the Internet era was under way. Newsweek would crown 1995 "the Year of the Internet," and over the next five years the Web would transform not just computer technology but banking and finance, Wall Street, the media, retail shopping, and, inevitably if more slowly, politics. Randlett watched as hundreds of brand-new software companies, Internet startups, and new media enterprises run by people his age joined more established companies — chip, computer, and semiconductor manufacturers, along with a few biotechnology pioneers — in turning the entire high-tech industry into a moneymaking phenomenon of gold-rush proportions.
The boom in Silicon Valley, John Doerr, a venture capitalist, bragged, was "the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." And it was even more. When the Silicon Valley phenomenon first burst upon the national consciousness, it was packaged not as business but as a "digital revolution" — thanks largely to the efforts of Wired magazine, which contributed heavily to the hype.
Wired would wind up, at the turn of the century, being sold to Condé Nast in a deal that celebrated the mainstreaming of Silicon Valley. But when it was first launched, Wired's "revolutionary" worldview owed a lot to the particular and cranky mind of aging hippie Louis Rossetto. His style combined a kind of Whole Earth evangelism and a don't-tread-on-me Ayn Randism with a weakness for futurist big ideas. His message was light on the business realities of the high-tech industry, and heavy on "vision."
Yet Rossetto's prescient view of Silicon Valley as not simply an industry but a driving cultural force made the magazine an instant success with old media. Wired's neon design was immediately copied by every marketer trying to signify digital cool, and its overheated interpretation of the significance of the digital revolution spread.
And its peculiar political stance had a big impact on the way Washington politicians and New York journalists saw the Valley. In its early issues, from 1993 to 1995, Wired highlighted the self-conscious radicalism of "cypherphreaks" and "cyberpunks" who worked on the fringes of the programming underground, and embraced the antiregulatory, pro-privacy values of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. It gave voice to the antigovernment rants of establishment conservatives like George Gilder and to the pro-business manifestos of futurists like Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. And it attempted to brand the politics of the digital revolution as being as defiantly libertarian and proudly capitalist as Rossetto himself. In Wired's pages, Rossetto and his band of "digerati" railed against public education ("the last great bastion of socialism"), mainstream economists ("international economic theory is obsolete"), and the idea of government in general ("a dumb, 18th century dodo").
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Hack a Party Line by Sara Miles. Copyright © 2001 Sara Miles. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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