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

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're young, they're cool, they get it."
Translation: Fuck opportunity based on skill, this is a politically based system of finding the youngest possible candidates at the lowest price. If they are bandwagoneers, all the better.

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...

Re:huh

[operagost]

It's easy to write them off, but the fact is that we already have an affirmative action infrastructure in the USA, which could easily be adapted for every conceivable "protected class". Affirmative action should have been retired 15-20 years ago, once it had outlived its usefulness. Now, it remains as a dangerous tool of political manipulation.

Just great

[Sqreater]

Watch them destroy silicon valley with political correctness and hyperliberalism.

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:Just great

[khallow]

Reminds me of the adjacent story, "Harbingers of Failure".

Re:Just great

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Blue Cross in Michigan used "Oh, our mainline plan, good for 50 years, is now legally substandard because it doesn't offer (fuck if I know, abortions for Pekingese maybe) as an excuse to dump tons of people off the gold standard Blue Cross plan, and then offer new plans for thousands of dollars more a year.

There was nothing substandard at all about the previous plan, as it was the mainline Blue Cross plan, and even if so, that's irrelevant, because a Man Who Wasn't Lying said you could keep your plan. Well, we couldn't because that fraudulent liar made that plan illegal.

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:Lame duck

[JackieBrown]

I would say he helped improve race relations

I'd have to say this is one of his biggest failures. I have never seen a president try to play races against each other as much as this one. "If I had a son, he would look like Travon?" WTF?? Can you imagine if Regan/Bush Sr/Clinton said "If I had a son, he would look like [insert white victim killed by black man]"

Has nothing to do with idealism

[NotDrWho]

Has everything to do with:

1) Corporations' cozy relationship with politicians
2) Ex-staffers promising companies inside info and access

Convenient lobbyists

[phantomfive]

It's common knowledge that Silicon Valley companies are hiring more and more lobbyists (especially ones that have a high need to change regulations, like Uber).
Obama staffers make convenient lobbyists. They have connections.

You could see Obama's character in '08

[MikeRT]

When riding high on his popularity, he voted for the telecom immunity bill. If he'd voted against it, he'd have been able to walk into the debates like a rock star because he'd be one of the only big names who actually acted on his promises. Even many of his opponents would have given him props for sticking to his guns.

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.

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.

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

[operagost]

Of course they don't have jobs. There are no jobs to be had. Do you understand? THERE ARE NO WHITE COLLAR JOBS. If you send your hypothetical undereducated person to get a four year degree, now he is a well-educated, still-unemployed person. Most Americans-- heck, most people in the world-- are not looking to expatriate for employment, so the "world job market" is not relevant. Education is great, but it's not the cause of this problem.

Re:Color Blindness is a "Micro-Aggression"

[Shortguy881]

Lol, yeah after reading this the only option left is to not talk to someone that is a minority or a woman. Anything you say is a micro aggression.

Here are some addendums:

White men should not congregate together. Groups of white men send the message that women and minorities are not welcome.

White men should not congregate with minorities or women. It trivializes their struggles and and makes it seem like you are patronizing them.

Re:Color Blindness is a "Micro-Aggression"

[Anonymous Coward]

It is simply anti-white politics. Racism never goes away, it is human nature. Instead it attack the group that peoples can get away with. And by excluding women, the professional victim, this will go on for a long time because men will not accept to plead victim-hood to make it stop.

This is brilliant social engineering. There is no way out of this situation, the enemies of the West has already won.