Obama remains strongest candidate on tech issues

If you are looking for a president who understands your geeky world and fights for relevant technology issues, Barack Obama is your man. The only other candidate who comes close to Obama in technological know how and support on the issues is Ron Paul, currently running a distant fourth in spite of a massive internet grass roots effort to get him elected. Clinton and McCain are both very weak in the politics of technology.

Obama went so far as to release a comprehensive technology white paper outlining his positions on the issues that are important to technological advances. He was the first candidate to set up a social network for his followers to use like a political MySpace. There his supporters can meet each other, discuss issues and organize rallies, fundraisers and other events, like phone campaigns.

He was the first candidate to use Twitter as a means of communicating with his base. If you are on Twitter you can follow Barack Obama and get updated on where he is speaking each day, where you can see him on television, where his speeches are being shown online and receive other links and commentary in 140 characters or less. The only other candidates to try Twitter were Ron Paul, who hasn’t sent an update in quite some time, and John Edwards, whose updates stopped when he dropped out of the race.

Barack Obama is on MySpace, you can add him as a friend on FaceBook and Friendster. You can join his groups on all three sites, or become his fan on FaceBook. He pops up all over the web, including places like StumbleUpon via user submissions of his speeches and video clips. He even offers a way to get SMS updates to your phone through IM or Twitter if you want constant, on the go Obama news.

He is constantly compared to John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. I agree, but not for the reasons people think. I think he is a different person, with different values and abilities. Yes, his speaking abilities and his unique ability to foster a message of hope in a crowd during hopeless times is vaguely like them, but I think the similarity between them all is in how they command media.

Kennedy and King both understood and utilized the media of their time – television and radio. They used their ability to motivate to make those media work to their advantage, sparking change. Obama has that same talent for using the tools at hand in the age of the internet. Just as television changed politics when Kennedy went against Nixon, I think the internet is changing politics now, and Obama is the only viable candidate riding the wave.

With all of this technological savvy, where does Obama stand on the issues that are important to the internet and people in technology?

• Believes in Network Neutrality as essential for free speech and innovation in business, and as instrumental in keeping the internet a thriving place for discussion and discovery
• Thinks the FCC did not do enough to promote competition with the 700MHz spectrum auctions
• Thinks the internet is important to education and supports federal mandates to bring broadband to schools that couldn’t otherwise afford it
• Believes the Internet should remain tax free
• Thinks the H1-B visa program should be increased temporarily from where it is now
• Supports caps on carbon emissions and use of technology to achieve the goal
• Supports strong digital privacy protections, including prevention of government spying on citizens
• Supports electronic health records and plans on investing $10 billion over five years to implement digital health systems
• Wants to even the playing field online by stopping loopholes that allow venture capitalists to recognize investment profits as capital gains
• Supports spending $150 billion over ten years toward biofuel research and a new fuel infrastructure, including transitioning to a new digital electricity grid and eliminating or reducing our dependence on gas and electricity
• Wants to increase federal science and research funding for clean energy projects, utilizing the vast resources and ability of our national laboratories, universities and land grant colleges to create clean alternatives to current energy use, with a goal of a 50% increase in efficiency by 2030
• Supports creating a venture capital fund to help make clean technologies discovered in commercial, private and university labs available to the public
• Wants open government via technology: open data, open access, open participation with a goal of complete awareness of how the government is working for the public and less dependence on lobbyists and special interests
• Supports patent reform through technology, including citizen reviews
• Wants to appoint the nations first CTO (Chief Technology Officer) to help guide us into the future and eliminate some of the antiquated processes that are holding our country back
• Supports start up businesses and innovation by wanting to make the R&D Tax Credit Permanent
• Wants broadband not only for schools, but for everyone – sees the internet as the great equalizer of our time, like television and radio once were, and is willing to challenge current government spectrum allocation to reach the goal

Reviewing these few bullet points of Obama’s comprehensive technology policy, it is plain to see he has a firm grasp of the issues. He could be the president geeks everywhere have been waiting for. What do you think? Answer the poll below to let us know, and then watch the video of Obama’s Q&A session on technology after that.

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