In presidential campaigns, some classic settings — the New Hampshire pancake breakfast, the Iowa school auditorium, the South Carolina church hall — have served as the stage for candidates hoping to deliver their message up close and personal.
It may be time to add a new one — the shiny new Silicon Valley auditorium filled with 1,000 multitasking tech types, laptops ablaze, cell phones on stun and fingers at the ready to research questions and a candidate’s answers in real time.
This is the Mountain View headquarters of the Internet search engine and online advertising giant Google, where Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was grilled last week on a host of tough issues, including: Did he really read the classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate before voting in favor of the authorization for war in Iraq? (He said yes.)
And where an entirely different kind of humor is in evidence, as when Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a few weeks earlier in the same spot, took this mind-boggling tongue-in-cheek question: “How do you determine good ways of sorting 1 million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” (McCain’s response: He laughed.)
No, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
We’re in the Googleplex.
And candidates have been finding their way to this entirely different heartland where retail politics meets the 21st century, along with new verbs (googling), new voter constituencies (Googlers) and even some newly minted campaign themes.
“I’m not a rock star. I don’t have googles of money,” said Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to laughs in his May session before Google employees.
With four candidates having already made the pilgrimage — Richardson, Edwards, McCain and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — and the rest of the pack invited, Google’s unusual presidential “job interview” town halls highlight how candidates are searching for new and effective venues to lay out their agendas in the competitive and crowded 2008 contest.
“It’s a symptom of the Information Age,” said Bob Boorstin, a former national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and former Democratic strategist who is now a top Google corporate communications executive.
As a presidential candidate, “you used to go to General Motors,” Boorstin said. “Now you go to Google.”
The firm, which employs more than 12,000 worldwide, opens the candidate forums to workers at its Mountain View campus; it Webcasts the events live to employees throughout the United States and posts the forums on YouTube, the online video site that is also owned by Google, so non-Googlers can see them, too.
“Google is the pre-eminent company in America right now … a brand that’s associated with the future, what’s new, what’s next, what’s empowering and innovative,” said Peter Leyden, who heads the San Francisco-based New Politics Institute. “There’s a cachet of hanging out with Google — and having their folks listening to you.”
Campaign advisers say the Google stage presents a challenging, newsworthy venue to showcase a candidate’s versatility.
“Google … employs some of the best and brightest in this generation. It’s the very front end of innovation and technology,” said Matt Davis, McCain’s campaign spokesman. He noted that McCain, the first Republican presidential candidate to visit Google this year, took some tough queries about the Iraq war — but also won a standing ovation from the largely progressive audience.
“Sen. McCain enjoys taking part in these town halls — not only to answer their questions but to learn from them on the issues,” Davis said. “And with this crowd, it’s a very different set of issues than you get in Iowa and New Hampshire.”
Indeed, many of the Googlers, who are mostly in their 20s and 30s, are especially invested in a firm where casual dress, free meals, free transportation, on-site foosball and other perks have created a business culture unlike any in America.
But they’re hardly softies.
“Google people ask tough questions, and they don’t give much wiggle room for being vague,” said Jon Salz, 27, a company software engineer.
“It’s a unique audience,” agreed Casey Verst, 23, a legal assistant for Google who sat in the company auditorium working on his laptop while waiting for Edwards last week. A registered Republican, Verst said he wanted to hear details on Iraq, education and health care that might help him decide his vote in 2008 — because in 2004, “I voted for the other guy, and I’m sorry I did.”
But “a candidate has to do his homework” coming to a place like this, said Phil de Vellis, who — with the sign-on of ParkRidge 47 — was the heralded creator of the “Vote Different” ad, a political “mash-up” anti-Clinton revision of the landmark Apple 1984 television commercial.
De Vellis, whose homemade ad has been seen by millions on YouTube, said candidates need to show an understanding of issues that resonate with tech-savvy younger Americans — from Net neutrality to broadband access — or they risk being seen as irrelevant.
“Instead of being afraid, they should be saying, ‘Oh God, how can we use something like that?’ ” he said.
But such forums, along with YouTube broadcasts that put the events before millions of potential voters, bring the potential for land mines — and headlines — that can hurt a presidential campaign.
Some candidates, such as Clinton, have managed to score with the opportunity. Questioned in February by Google Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt — who worked closely with former President Bill Clinton on Internet issues — the New York senator won cheers by calling Google “the best place to work in America,” and talking up her tech credentials regarding legislation on computerizing health care data and nanotechnology.
Richardson, by contrast, stumbled in May and appeared unschooled about many of the company’s innovations. He urged more solar power and called for tax credits for companies that use it — never mentioning that the firm’s Mountain View facility, with thousands of solar panels, is one of the largest solar-powered corporate sites on the planet.
“We’re already there,” Google vice president for global communications, Elliot Schrage, told him.
Last week, Edwards also ran into troubles — raising eyebrows when he appeared unfamiliar with a key Google issue after being asked whether companies like Google should continue to do business in China.
“I don’t know … you do business in China, I assume,” Edwards told Schrage.
Google and other search engines have been the subject of controversy and major headlines for more than a year regarding their 2006 decision to censor search services in China according to rules set by government officials there. Critics say the move quashes dissent; Google and other companies say it allows millions of Chinese access to the Internet and puts their firms on equal ground to compete in China’s growing market.
Asked later by reporters, Edwards attempted to recover on the subject. “I would be engaged with the Chinese in a very tough way to make sure they’re aware of where we see abuses occur … whether it’s intellectual property rights, human rights,” he said.
The former North Carolina senator also took heat — and later had to backtrack — on a matter related to his vote to authorize the war in Iraq.
“There was this National Intelligence Estimate that was confidential, that … you had to have a security clearance or members of the Senate could read,” Schrage said, referring to the high-level 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that compiled information on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. “Did you have a chance to read that?”‘
“I read it, I read it,” Edwards said.
But the statement at Google was at odds with his spokesman Mark Kornblau, who according to a Politco.com report said the senator had not read the report.
After the Google forum, Kornblau told Politico.com that Edwards “misunderstood” the question and was referring to his reading of a declassified version of the document and other summarized briefings of classified material.
Edwards has been the most outspoken opponent of the Iraq war among the major Democratic candidates and has since apologized for his October 2002 vote. The issue of whether lawmakers at the time diligently pursued the information available to them before casting their votes has come up repeatedly — with, for example, Clinton’s staff saying she didn’t read the classified intelligence estimate but received numerous briefings about its details before voting in favor of the authorization.
The headlines that have followed the candidates in the new Google setting, Leyden said, illustrate the intense and unexpected challenges and the potential rewards of political leaders engaging in what could, thanks to technology, become a kind of “America’s town hall” presidential forum.
“Two years, it took a lot of convincing of people in politics, in D.C. and the Hill, that new media and the new environment needed to be seriously engaged,” he said. “They all get it now, that there’s a massive shift going on.
“And they see the power of YouTube and a premier company that is right at ground zero,” he added.
To view the Google presidential candidate forums:
McCain: http://links.sfgate.com/ZFX
Clinton: http://links.sfgate.com/ZFY
Richardson: http://links.sfgate.com/ZFZ
Edwards: links.sfgate.com/ZGA
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