These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

By the 1990s, wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would lead a Democratic Party that had restructured itself around their priorities. Beginning in 1972, the DNC instituted quotas for its delegations, requiring numbers of women, minorities, and youth but establishing no quotas for union members or the working class. The new rules made it possible for affluent professionals to take over the party, a change of course much influenced by longtime Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton’s Changing Sources of Power (1971). Dutton argued that the future of the party was young professionals, not old union members.130 Colorado senator Gary Hart, in 1974, took to mocking “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats” as fusty and old-fashioned, not hip to the young computer people. The press called Hart’s constituency “Atari Democrats.”131 Personal computing enthusiasts liked to invoke “the power of the people,” but they meant the power of the individual person, fortified with a machine. Republicans, the party of big business, remained closely associated with IBM; Democrats, the party of the people, attached themselves to Apple, and jettisoned people without the means or interest in owning their own computer.