Obama Hosts Internet Summit in Silicon Valley
San Francisco Chronicle reports:
President Obama - on his first official trip to the Bay Area that didn't involve political fundraising - held a dinner meeting Thursday to talk job creation and education with a star-studded team of Silicon Valley executives and leaders, many of them past generous contributors to Democratic causes.
Crowds lined the streets in tiny downtown Woodside, waving and cheering encouragement as the president's motorcade passed through on its way to the secluded estate of star Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, who have both been ranked among the country's most deep-pocketed political donors.
Obama's guest list for the dinner, which lasted about two hours, was short and exclusive, a hand-picked sampling of a dozen executives with connections to powerhouse Internet firms that touch the lives of billions of consumers around the globe. But several of the guests on the list, in addition to being big political contributors, also head firms that rank among the biggest spenders in the nation on computer industry lobbying, according to new campaign finance reports.
Dining with Obama along with Doerr, a partner in Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, were Carol Bartz, president and CEO of Yahoo; Cisco Systems' CEO John Chambers; Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Attendees also included Stanford University President John Hennessy; Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs; Genentech Chairman and former CEO Art Levinson; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Many of the guests have worked with Obama in the past on key issues, and all of them - except for Costolo of Twitter - are high-profile members of TechNet, a high-tech advocacy group founded in Silicon Valley more than a decade ago.
The organization's leadership has been engaged since the Clinton administration in pushing for what the group describes as policies to boost American leadership in the global arena - including "tax policy, free trade, broadband and Internet policy, basic research, patent litigation reform, and health IT," according to the group's website.
But critics - who suggested that the president was paving the way for his 2012 re-election campaign with the stop - noted that the invitees were also generous political givers, mostly to Democratic causes. Ten of Obama's guests donated a total of more than $900,000 to Obama and candidates for Congress in the past decade, according to research from MAPLight.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Berkeley.
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