HOW TO HACK A PARTY LINE: The Democrats and Silicon Valley.

• Author: Oreskes, Michael
• Position: Review

HOW TO HACK A PARTY LINE: The Democrats and Silicon Valley by Sara Miles Basic Books, $27.00

Valley of the Dollars

DRAMATIC ECONOMIC CHANGE--the move from farm to city, or from blue collar to white--has, generally speaking, been followed by substantial political realignment. Sara Miles sets herself no less a task than documenting such a realignment from the heartland of the "New Economy," Silicon Valley. Miles, a writer for Wired and other magazines, chooses as her focal point the efforts of Wade Randlett to raise money and organize support for Democrats among the Valley's venture capitalists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

It is an intriguing idea, and there is much interesting material in this book as Miles escorts us through the anthropology of first contact between the alien cultures of cyberspace and the Beltway.

"Fifty years from now, Silicon Valley will be more powerful than Washington, but people in Washington don't see it yet," the head of a software finn confides to her. The hubris is breathtaking, and well-recorded by Miles. This ignorance and naivete about government and politics gives another meaning to digital divide. At one point, Rep. Anna Eshoo of California's fourteenth district is touring Synopsys, a software firm, and is offered a briefing on how the firm's product automates chip-making:

"`We've replaced RTL code with behavioral compilers,' began a 28-year-old engineer named Tony Dimalanta, launching his show-and-tell in a small cubicle. The congresswoman stared somewhat blankly at a screen full of algorithms. Dimalanta clicked on a flow chart ... `Now this is awesome,' he continued. `Tony,' Eshoo interrupted. `Tell me, who is your Representative?'

"Dimalanta blushed like a ninth-grader caught day-dreaming by his social studies teacher. `Uh, I don't actually know,' he said."

In Miles' telling, Silicon Valley views politics as a system that needs debugging. Congress, one engineer tells her, is not logical. Politics is about getting things done, not about making hard choices or resolving competing interests. Now in fairness, a lot of 28-year-olds do not know who their representatives are. But in the past, most of them weren't millionaires. Which is where Wade Randlett enters the picture. An ambitious, driven young man, he sensed an opportunity to tap the burgeoning wealth of the high-tech industries to build political influence in the Democratic party, although whether he's motivated for his industry or for himself remains...