Obama had a lot of support in big business, much more than any discussion of the campaign that I know of would suggest.
But where the story got really interesting for us is when we did our usual move, which was start looking at pieces of the business community, usually sectors first. And there we quickly discover that in certain industries Obama’s support is running way higher than his average. And those industries turn out to be six in particular: telecommunications, electronics, defense, software on the web, computers, and manufacturing for the web.
In June 2013, when the Snowden revelations hit, you know, from Glen Greenwald and company at The Guardian, and to some extent The Washington Post, we were looking at these results and said, you know, this is really very interesting. These sectors that are showing extremely high percentages of contribution to Obama are precisely the sectors in which a large number of those firms that are mentioned are real active. And at that point, you know, we know we have a really interesting conclusion, which is that a lot of the Obama bastions of support, maybe the biggest of all, is precisely those firms, the ones responsible for the surveillance—I should say, sectors in which those firms predominate. On the other hand, I can also tell you, without trying to go firm-by-firm, a lot of the folks discussed in The Guardian and other publications, Google, Facebook, Apple, for example, they all contain substantial contributions or contributors, ‘cause you can have both the firm and executives contribute under our rules these days. They show up for the Democrats in substantial amounts.
Bush and Cheney may have invented it, but national Democratic Party leaders are full-fledged players in the 21st-century national surveillance state. And the interest-group pressures that now help to sustain its defenders in Washington work just as powerfully on Democrats as on Republicans.
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