Why Clinton Tries To Court The `geek Freaks' 

Eric Ellis

12/10/1997

When San Francisco investment banker Sanford Robertson says he had dinner with Bill Clinton, he makes no exaggerated boast about a Democratic rubber chicken fund-raiser in a hotel conference room. Or even at the White House in Washington, with 500 others who really run America, helping Clinton "heal and feel the national pain". With Robertson, it's a one-on-one, often at his magnificent San Francisco mansion, the oldest in the city. And if it's not tete-a-tete, it's with a tight San Francisco coterie thrusting their city into the heart of US power. The President comes to them.

San Francisco is not the Washington beltway or New York's power elite, but it's not far behind. Thanks to the sudden billions generated by 20-somethings in nearby Silicon Valley, genteel San Francisco has re-emerged very much on the DC radar screen. The US's biggest State in population terms, California accounts for about 12 per cent of the country's population and wealth - but nearly 25 per cent of the top 400 political benefactors, according to the Washington-based Centre for Responsive Politics. And Sandy Robertson is top of that list in San Francisco.

But it's a different, quintessentially Californian approach to networking, a political ethos that is being remade in the image of Silicon Valley's pizza and coffee-obsessed inventors of the future.

Sharp young operators like Dan Case and Wade Randlett - Case just out of his 30s, Randlett just arriving - typify the emerging establishment in the US "New Economy". White, well-educated and over-achieving, their proverbial smoke-filled room is more likely to be blinking with modems dispatching e-mail than old party hacks dispatching Johnnie Walker. Dan Case looks as if he'd be more comfortable networking during an hour on the Stairmaster, or while shussing down a double-diamond black run at nearby Squaw Valley, than some polite gentlemen's club.

Like Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, Case runs the blue-blooded San Francisco investment bank Hambrecht and Quist, just two blocks away from competitor and close friend, Robertson. (There must have been something in the cornflakes at the Case household - Dan's younger brother, Steve, founded and runs America Online, the world's biggest internet provider). Under Case's stewardship, "Hamquist" has backed some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, reinventing itself as a tech-specific investment bank, moving away from the more patrician patronage of its co-founder Bill Hambrecht.

At 40, Case is emerging as something of an elder statesmen in what he described as the valley's "very young and somewhat immature political culture". He is a prime mover of the Technology Network, a well-funded coalition of valley interests recently formed to lobby Washington.

Tech-Net is the valley's first organised political lobby group. It grew out of "Gore-Tech", the group of valley luminaries who advise the White House on technology.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, "Gore-Tech" has evolved into a Democratic cashpoint machine, leading to the more bipartisan Tech-Net. (Interestingly, it also happens to be dominated by leading lights in the anti-Microsoft lobby) "You don't have to scratch the surface in Washington too hard these days to find a San Francisco-based player situated pretty high up the pole," says Case.

"Tech-Net" is run by 32 year-old Wade Randlett. Mobile-phone wielding, Armani-suited and fast-talking, Randlett is the political operator for the New Economy. A self-confessed "geek freak", Randlett is exploiting a Silicon Valley niche, building a political empire amongst people who have suddenly and unwittingly found themselves in a political spotlight because of the money they mint, and the implications of their inventions.

"Up until very recently, it's been two separate worlds, politics and high-tech," Randlett said recently.

"I thought, here's a group of 28-year-old CEOs who've created an entirely new economy, and as soon as they understand their political potential, they can exert as much power as they choose. You could just see the congressmen going, `My God, these guys are green'. "Politics is just common sense and human nature. I say, listen, you're rich. Politicians need money. If you like them, then there's nothing wrong with giving them some of it." Sandy Robertson is also big in Tech-Net, and San Francisco life. He is very much an establishment figure, albeit with a modern take on how business and power mix today.

Now 66, and after building one of the country's most successful investment bank and broking houses, Robertson is happy to play father confessor to employees and tinker near full-time with politics.

Robertson today is Silicon Valley's eminence grise.

It helps, too, that Robertson is one of California's richest men (even richer since June when he sold his Asia-tilted investment bank to San Francisco Bank of America for $US540 million, perfect timing given the events that followed a month later). But it's political pull that attracts.

President Clinton has come to California 30 times in his presidency, Gore even more, and when they do they usually look up Sandy Robertson.

It wouldn't have happened a decade ago. Robertson was a life-long Republican but the emergence of Silicon Valley, and the effect on his business, made for a political epiphany during the 1992 campaign.

It's a volte-face the Republicans haven't forgiven him for, and helps keep Clinton-Gore in the White House. "I saw what was driving this city, this State and it was pretty clear it would soon to be driving the country and thus the world. And the Republicans didn't understand it," he told the AFR recently.

"My personal politics haven't really changed. It's more that the Democrats came to me, as the GOP drifted away and in some cases were downright hostile to valley interests.

"The Republicans are now starting to wake up but I think the Democrats have got this market cornered for a little while yet."