Senator Barack Obama doesn't have any particular expertise in technology policy, nor any backround in business. Like many Democrats, he's ambivalent about free trade, in favour of higher taxes on the wealthy, and officially suspicious of the corporate elite.

Yet in Silicon Valley, and throughout the "New Economy," Obama enjoys overwhelming support, and the backing of this relatively small but influential segment of the electorate is central to his presidential bid.

The first question, then, is why exactly is Obama so popular among the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists? From personal experience I can say that starting and running a business makes you a bit callous towards, say, employer mandates relating to health care, or family leave, or workers' compensation, or just about any type of regulation.

Personally, I don't get that worked up about taxes, but the same can't be said for many of my compatriots. Venture capitalists, moreover, have as their biggest political priority the protection of favourable tax treatment for so-called "carried interest," hardly something for which any Democrat is likely to fight terribly vigorously.

Or to put it another way, business people traditionally lean Republican for pretty straightforward reasons. So why the Silicon Valley love-fest with Obama?

The first and most important reason, I think, is cultural. Silicon Valley, and California in general, gets a lot of its energy from cultural diversity. If you're running a start-up, you hardly care what colour your VP of engineering is, or whom she might be sleeping with, or whether she's an evangelical Christian or pot head or a Wicca. It only matters whether she can get the job done.

Meritocracy breeds social tolerance; the workforce in Silicon Valley is ethnically and socially diverse not because of any mandates, but because of the requirements of success.

Obama, of course, is a living symbol of the strengths of multi-culturalism, and is likely to resist the nativist impulses that do exist in some corners of the Democratic Party.

The Republican party, on the other hand, has over the past 20 years become far more closely aligned with the anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion posture of the religious right. This is anathema to the New Economy crowd.

The second reason for Obama's popularity is age, plain and simple. New Economy culture is a youth culture. Nobody in Silicon Valley sees himself in an aging military man who was accepted to Annapolis Naval Academy primarily because his father was an Admiral. They do, on the other hand, see themselves reflected in a young, ambitious lawyer.

The third reason (related to the first) is profound disgust with a Republican party that has so often left reason behind in favour of religion. Technologists have no time for "faith-based" anything, and are aghast when scientific investigation into areas like stem cell research is quashed for religious reasons. Similarly they are not interested in crusades, against Al Qaeda or anyone else. The irrationality of launching a war in Iraq, the apparent deceptions involved, and the horrendous execution violate every tenet of good engineering.

Finally, Obama is benefiting from the groundwork laid by Al Gore, who was in fact quite tech-savvy and engaged with New Economy issues. Gore's marriage of technological optimism and focus on the environment proved to be a great combination politically; it played into the idea – always popular among technologists – that even a problem as big as global warming could be tackled effectively by clever engineers and smart policy-makers.

Why does all this matter? For one thing, New Economy participants are a meaningful swing constituency these days, not so much in solidly pro-Democrat California but certainly in battleground states like Colorado and Virginia.

Even more importantly, the support of technology executives and VCs will help inoculate Obama against any perception that he is "anti-business." With the economy in the tank, you can expect plenty of anti-corporate rhetoric this fall, and it helps to have some real capitalists defending your flank.

And of course association with entrepreneurs and tech whiz-kids gives credibility both to specific policy initiatives around alternative energy, and to a more general sense of being keenly interested in the future. Partly for this reason, the New Economy liberal elite is, at least potentially, less alienating to heartland voters than the traditional East Coast liberal elite. If Obama can successfully make that distinction, it will help him a lot.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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