The US Presidential race has candidates chasing dollars like hounds after a fox, and one of their favorite destinations in rich Silicon Valley has been Google.
Politicians Continue Courting Googlers
People who have been with Google since its IPO days enjoyed watching the stock climb from an $85 debut to over $500 a share. Multiply that by enough stock options, and many at the company became millionaires.
Such wealth attracted the most cash-hungry beings on the planet. A stream of politicians visited Google’s headquarters in Mountain View over the past few months, all of them hoping to make some of that money flow toward their voracious campaigns.
Texas aspirant Ron Paul, more of a web darling than a mainstream attraction by the poll numbers, became the latest visitor to Mountain View. Google’s Adam Kovacevich posted about his appearance, met by an overflow crowd.
Paul is no panderer to the masses. Kovacevich noted how Paul’s views of net neutrality (he’s against it) or federal student loans (against those too) likely ran against the grain of Googlers. A show of hands found many attending Paul’s speech had been student loan recipients at one time.
His appearance followed those of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Bill Richardson and John Edwards. If one of them managed to capture the fancy of enough young Google millionaires, the candidate could be entering the primary season in 2008 with a lot of contribution-fueled confidence.
