Google Courting Obama

Of course, the company wouldn’t think of officially endorsing Obama, since half the country might not take that too well. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt will start campaigning on Obama’s behalf starting this week. Schmidt had already been serving as an official technology advisor to the candidate, and tells the Journal that this decision to more strenuously back Obama is a “natural evolution” from that position. Schmidt’s role in the campaign starts this Tuesday, when he and Obama appear in Florida and moderate a panel on the economy.

So what’s in it for Schmidt, who’s backed both Democrats and Republicans and addressed a conference of Tories in Great Britain? The Journal notes how simpatico Obama and Schmidt are on net neutrality, and points out the Yahoo deal that’s been the subject of so much Beltway scrutiny.

But if this International Herald Tribune piece is any indication, the Yahoo deal may much more central to Schmidt’s thinking, and part of a new approach by Google to take Washington more seriously Like Microsoft before it, Google has been accused of imagining that the nation’s capitol, with its tired old lobbyists and rules of Senatorial privilege, was stuck in the past, and the tech world was rapidly making it a relic. But in its anti-trust trial eight years ago, Microsoft discovered that power mattered an awful lot, and has since taken great pains to learn how to court interest groups, lobbyists and Washington lawmakers. According to the IHT story, that work has paid off in the Google-Yahoo deal, as Microsoft assembled an army of disparate interest groups to oppose the arrangement.

Meanwhile, Google has been much less aggressive in courting Washington, and even declared that the two companies would enact the deal in October regardless of how the Justice Department feels about it. “I watched that with some amusement, because policy makers don’t like to be told that they’re irrelevant,” a tech lobbyist told the Tribune, “and what that announcement amounted to was they were told they are irrelevantNow, Google and Yahoo have suspended the deal until Justice is done poking at it, and Google is busy taking a crash course in massaging Washington. The company’s put former Clinton Justice official Jamie Gorelick on its legal team, and pushed to establish closer relationships with the Cato Institute and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Clearly, Eric Schmidt will have a lot to talk about the next time he swaps scones with Barack Obama.

Obama photo by Llima, courtesy of Flickr