In the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, a gutsy Indian-American patent lawyer, backed by top investors and executives of tech giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, is making waves in his bid to oust a veteran fellow-Democrat in the run-up to a keenly-watched Congressional race.
Ro (Rohit) Khanna has surprised political watchers by raising nearly two million dollars for his electoral bid — three times of what has been mopped up by his rival, the seven-term Michael Honda.
Although President Barack Obama has endorsed the 72-year-old Honda, the 37-year-old Khanna can also claim proximity to the President, having been appointed by him as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Commerce in 2009. Khanna, however, left the post two years later and joined a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm.
“Silicon Valley has traditionally stayed aloof from politics. But richer and more powerful than ever, the tech industry has become increasingly involved, both in lobbying and in fund-raising,” The New York Times reported from Sunnyvale, California, pointing to the top US tech guns that Khanna has already won over.
The Indian-American challenger’s big-time tech supporters include Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Congress isn’t working and the voters of California’s 17th District have an opportunity to send a message — by supporting a new type of forward-looking vision,” says Khanna on his election website, asserting he is “prepared to move beyond the finger pointing and game-playing with concrete solutions to create good paying jobs and to move America’s economy into the 21st century”.
Honda is also known to be a supporter of the tech industry but not of the aggressive brand that Khanna professes to be, declaring that he “understands how critical innovation and technology are to maintaining America’s position as the greatest dynamic economy in the world”.
It is for the second time that the Philadelphia-born Khanna, who graduated in economics from the University of Chicago and earned his law degree from Yale, is taking on a Democratic veteran of California. Back in 2004, he lost in a similar party primary battle against the redoubtable Tom lantos.