Silicon Valley Is Filling Up With Ex-Obama Staffers

HughPickens.com writes: Edward-Isaac Dovere reports in Politico that the fastest-growing chapter of the Obama alumni association is in Silicon Valley. For the people who helped get Obama elected and worked for him once he did, there's something about San Francisco and its environs that just feels right: the emphasis on youth and trying things that might fail, chasing that feeling of working for the underdog, and even using that word "disrupting" to describe what they do. "A lot of people who moved out here were present at the creation of the Obama '08 campaign," says Tommy Vietor. "There's a piece of them that wants to replicate that." Vietor left the White House two years ago, and he and his business partner, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, founded a communications strategy firm with a focus on speechwriting for tech and other start-ups. "If you're writing for a CEO out here, they're more likely to be your peer than your grandfather," says Vietor. "They're young, they're cool, they get it."

Other former Obama staffers who have come to Silicon Valley include former campaign manager and White House adviser David Plouffe at Uber, Kyle O'Connor at Nest, Semonti Stephens at Twitter; Mike Masserman, at Lyft; Brandon Lepow at Facebook; Nicole Isaac, at LinkedIn; Liz Jarvis-Shean at Civis; Jim Green and Vivek Kundra at Salesforce, Alex McPhillips at Google; Gillian Bergeron, at NextDoor; Natalie Foster at the Institute for the Future; Catherine Bracy at Code for America; Hallie Montoya Tansey at Target Labs. Nick Papas, John Baldo, Courtney O'Donnell and Clark Stevens at AirBnB, and Jessica Santillo at Uber.

There are so many former Obama staffers in the Bay Area that a recent visit by former White House senior adviser David Axelrod served as a reunion of sorts, with more than a dozen campaign and White House veterans gathering over lunch to discuss life after the administration. Obama himself rarely misses an opportunity to come to San Francisco. He says he loves the energy there, loves the people and according to Dovere, the city's ultra-liberal leanings mean he was greeted as a rock star even during the dark days before last year's midterms. Obama's even become friendly with Elon Musk. "There should be a welcome booth at the SFO airport," says Jon Carson, the former Organizing for Action executive director now at SolarCity.

Comments

[T]hings that ... fail: lots of experience at that

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Obama staffers have a lot of experience at failure.

Syria: Fail. The "JV" has taken over.
Libya: Obama's exercise in failed "regime change" has left Libya more fucked up than what W did to Iraq. Why'd Obama depose Qaddafi again?
Iraq: Yep, fail. Sending troops back in...
Iran: About to surrender to crazed mullahs looking to get nukes. When the FRENCH call it a bad surrender...

US labor participation rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years. Only jobs being created are all part-time. Under-employment is at an all time high.

Obamacare FAIL: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

Lame duck

[tomhath]

A couple of dozen people moving to SF hardly qualifies as "filling up " that area. But it does indicate what shape the Democratic party is in; these are the people who got Obama elected - now there's no place for them in Washington and especially no place for them in the Clinton machine.

Re:Lame duck

[phantomfive]

Confirmation bias aside, he's actually been far better than many we've had in decades.

That's confirmation bias. The first thing he did was hire bankers to solve the banking crisis. Instead, he should have listened to wise people like Paul Volcker, who said, "Any company that is too big to fail is too big to exist. If a company needs government bailout money, it should be broken up and sold off in pieces."

ACA was a step in the right direction if you ideologically favor government control of healthcare, and it did help some people without healthcare, but it would have been cheaper to just buy those people healthcare (also, the law was so poorly written it took heroic interpretations from the supreme court to save it).

He favored gay marriage.....once it was politically expedient.

He got us out of Iraq......then back in, in a worse situation than when we left.

He started a war, then messed around in another war, and stuck his foot into situations he didn't understand, making a mess of things (Egypt, Honduras).,

He promised transparency........of all the things he promised, that was the one I most hoped for, because it could have the biggest effect. Fail on that point.

He failed to get his trade bill, which is either good or bad, depending on your ideology, but it shows his lack of competence for working with congress.

He did do some good things.....I would say he helped improve race relations, and personally he seems like a great guy; but overall, we haven't had a competent president in over a decade. It's depressing enough that I am voting, not on party, but entirely on competence. Right now there are a couple candidates from either party who I would be willing to vote for.

Re:Just great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Just like they've destroyed our health care system! Oh, wait...

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

And there's still time for the Obamacare premium death spiral to set in. How much higher can insurance rates go?

Re:huh

[Mashiki]

Look at what's happening in colleges and universities. You've got radical leftists and radical feminists pushing for racial quotas instead of merit. Even several universities have come out with their "meritocracy is a microaggression" bullshit. AKA University of California campuses. Surprise, those young, kids who want to be protected from everything...

yep

[Anonymous Coward]

"young" used to be a gentle way to say "gullible", "ill-informed", "not yet experienced enough in life to exercise proper caution and restraint particularly when the lives, liberty, and property of others are concerned", etc.

These hyper-political slimy freaks are going to where they will be most-comfortable: San Francisco - the home of American crypt-fascist corporate-politico evil where people are punished for not engaging in group-think, and engineering new ways to spy on, and manipulate, people for both corporations and politicians are the preferred way to get rich. The Bay Area and Team Obama deserve each other.

This is how big business pays-off corrupt politicians and their staffs for all the political favors they gave while in power:

Give 'em high-paid jobs they did not earn and are not qualified for

Put them on the Board of a corporation, with stock options which they can then cash-out and get rich from (Apple and Al Gore ring any bells?)

Line them up for access to some nice IPOs

Re:Just great

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

You prefer that there was a law passed which forced companies to offer the same plans for eternity?

If it's so obvious, then obviously Obama knew he was lying when he uttered those phrases.

Re:[T]hings that ... fail: lots of experience at t

[tomhath]

Historically only a small portion of the labor force has been well educated. The vast majority of the workforce was farm workers, laborers, factory workers, etc. Today most of those jobs are gone - partly because of mechanization, partly because manufacturing is too expensive in the US. Plus millions of people are out of the workforce because the government has made it so easy to qualify for disability.

Re:Convenient lobbyists

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly this. Many of these jobs are political patronage jobs. Crony capitalism has reached new heights under the Obama administration. I didn't think any president in my lifetime could be worse than George W. Bush but Obama is making me question my assumptions.

Re:huh

[cayenne8]

Perhaps they can move even further away from Washington (and the US govt in general)....to Europe for instance.

They all seem to want to try to turn the US into a socialistic type society modeled after much of Europe.

Right now we're looking more and more like Greece in a few years after they've left....

Re:You could see Obama's character in '08

[T.E.D.]

Ironically, if Obama had done even half of what he promised to clean up the government, he could have asked for a Cuban-style health care system and his popularity would have made it impossible for the Republicans to stop him. We've reached the point where an honest politician with balls could practically control the federal government just by sheer force of the people's awe at his honesty.

This reads like a work of fan fiction.

I live here in the real world, where 30% of the country votes Republican and hates Democratic presidents no matter what, and a large part of the rest listens to these people, or are just plain racist. A 2008 black president would never, never, never (oh, and did I say "never"?) have been able to talk Congress into passing socialized medicine. The fact that he passed any kind of universal coverage at all is in retrospect just ridiculous. I'm still in awe that he managed it. I say "he", but frankly a lot of people sacrificed for this. And it still teetered on a razor's edge at multiple points.

Do you not remember Senator Robert Byrd being wheeled into the Senate Chamber straight from his deathbed to break a Republican filibuster? They were trying to delay a vote (on an unrelated bill ahead of ACA on the docket) until he died and they could likely pick up his seat and kill the whole effort. Remember him whispering "shame shame" at his fellow senators for forcing him to do that, as many of them cynically applauded him? That's my memory. Thereafter Byrd did die, and they did pick up the seat, which stuck Congress with the bill in the form the Senate passed. Nothing new could possibly get past the filibuster.

If Obama had delayed even a couple of days in starting the process, we wouldn't have the ACA today. That's a fact.