Our series of podcasts and interviews with the 2008 presidential candidates continue – so far we’ve spoken to Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel. We are in active scheduling discussions with all of the remaining candidates.
Now it’s time to endorse a candidate from each party as having the most interesting and effective positions on technology issues.
We no longer live in an industrial economy – the future is information and the Internet. Our president must carefully consider her or his policies on key tech issues, something they’ve never really had to do before. What is their position on net neutrality? How will they bridge the digital divide? How do we handle technology sales to China and other countries using that technology to perpetrate human rights abuses? Should the Internet be taxed? How do we curb identity theft on the Internet? What is the future of intellectual property protection? How do we handle immigration issues for tech workers? How do we catch up with the rest of the world in the mobile Internet space? And what will we do to encourage research and productization in renewable energy?
These are issues that get little attention from mainstream press (with the exception of renewable energy policies), but we think that they deserve to be considered as part of this election. Technology workers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere tend to donate a lot of money and time to campaigns, and they are more frequent voters than the average cititzen. The candidate’s positions on technology and related issues impact how they spend their time, money and votes.
Please help us choose two candidates to endorse in advance of Super Tuesday. See how each candidate falls on the issues, and vote for who you think would make the best Tech President, at primaries.beta.techcrunch.com. And thanks to webreakstuff for building out the site for us.
We announced this yesterday to some major media outlets and got a great response. I was interviewed by ABC News (clip above) to talk about the podcasts and the endorsement yesterday. Today I spoke on Fox News as well (the clip will be up shortly). You can also read ABC’s coverage here.
Note that some of the campaigns (particularly Ron Paul) picked up on this yesterday from ABC’s coverage and started talking to their constituents about it. So some of the early results are skewed heavily towards those candidates. I expect over the next few days for the results to become more normalized.