Election 2012: where do Obama, Romney, Johnson, and Stein stand on tech issues?
Voting on cyber war, space, drone armies, and internet freedom — Popular tech got a moment in the spotlight in the townhall debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, when moderator Cindy Crowley sneaked Apple into an economic policy question.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tech's role in the 2012 race has been building for weeks: Obama and Romney laid out their positions in letters to the NY Tech Meetup in mid-October, and Cindy Crowley's decision to name-check Apple in the townhall debate prompted a round of post-mortems on how the candidates handled it, including AllThingsD's suggested answer to the iPad question. This roundup extends that thread beyond the two frontrunners to third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, scoring all four on cyber war, space, drones, and internet freedom.
The exercise has a longer lineage — TechCrunch was asking readers to endorse a 'first tech president' back in December 2007 — but 2012 is the first cycle where the comparison spans cyber conflict and drone policy as first-class campaign issues. Computerworld's syndicated pickups show the scorecard traveling beyond the tech press into mainstream IT coverage.
First-order effects
- Voters heading to the polls on November 6 get a side-by-side of where Obama, Romney, Johnson, and Stein stand on cyber war, space, drones, and internet freedom — areas the debates themselves barely covered.
- The campaigns face immediate pressure to defend or sharpen those positions, since the scorecard format makes gaps (and silence) on specific tech issues visible.
Second-order effects
- Moderators and debate organizers now have a template for pulling companies like Apple into economic questions, raising the odds that future debates field tech-specific prompts rather than leaving the sector to trade-press letters.
- Third-party candidates gain a comparative venue they otherwise lack: a tech-policy scorecard lets Johnson and Stein differentiate on drones and internet freedom without needing airtime in the major debates.
Third-order effects
- If every cycle now produces candidate tech scorecards — from TechCrunch's 2007 endorsement ask through the 2012 Meetup letters and debate questions — tech policy is institutionalizing as a standard campaign beat rather than an occasional curiosity.
- Persistent coverage of cyber war and drone policy as voter-facing issues builds the constituency pressure that tends to precede formal regulatory and legislative attention after the election.
The trend: Presidential campaigns are absorbing technology policy — cyber war, drones, space, internet freedom — as a recurring scored category, pushed by trade press and advocacy communities each cycle.