Journey of a Capital Insider From Hill To Valley

For him, Ronald Reagan is a political god. As a young Republican growing up in Zionsville, Ind., one of the most conservative towns in the Hoosier State, he believed that the "government that governs least governs best." A graduate of Catholic University, he interned for Grover Norquist at the Americans for Tax Reform, among other conservative groups, before landing a job at the National Association of Manufacturers. He ran the association's Web site, pushing the stodgy 113-year-old organization into blogs, podcasts and online videos. He even earned the association an unlikely distinction when, while vacationing in Australia over the New Year's holiday in 2005, Kralik wrote the first blog post of the new year. "That was vintage Kralik," says Pat Cleary, his boss at the time. "Thinking outside the box."

Though he's not a Washington expert by any means, "it doesn't take a PhD to figure out that the federal government has failed us," he says.

Gingrich calls Kralik a "young, smart, aggressive guy." He plucked Kralik, he says, because "we looked at finding someone who doesn't just study the Web -- it's a whole different culture -- but someone who lives in it.

"I've spent time in the Valley since leaving Congress, and two things have become clearer and clearer. One, the Valley operates in the technology of the 21st century. That's the Web. And two, if we are going to compete with India and China, we need to look a lot more like Palo Alto and less like Detroit. We're due for a transformation."

For years, Washington and the Valley have operated in silos. They didn't get each other. They didn't want to get each other.

Washington is top-down, centralized, "a series of fiefdoms," Kralik says. "Washington operates on the Peter Principle. You get promoted to the highest level of your own incompetence."

Silicon Valley is a bottom-up, "somewhat chaotic," decentralized network that thrives "on meritocracy," he continues. Twenty-somethings with an idea -- say, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- think their way to the top.

But in reality, the two worlds can't operate separately. In response to a spate of lawsuits against tech firms in the mid-1990s, Valley CEOs formed TechNet, a bipartisan network that lobbies in Washington. And by the time the Microsoft antitrust case made headlines in the late '90s, it was clear that the Valley needed to beef up its presence in Washington.

Says Peter Leyden, the former editor of Wired magazine who heads the New Politics Institute, a think tank focusing on technology's impact on Washington: "There's an emerging sense that both worlds need each other. Think of it this way: The scale of the problems that the world faces -- globalization, global warming, global terrorism -- can't be solved without these two hubs cooperating with each other."

Kralik knows all of this full well. On a recent six-hour flight from Washington to the Valley, he drafted a three-column chart. "The world that works." "The world that fails." "Making government from a world that fails to a world that works."

Kralik puts the U.S. Census Bureau in the world-that-fails column. After spending more than $150 million on handheld computers to count everyone in the country, the Census Bureau announced a few weeks ago that it will scrap that program and hire 600,000 temporary workers and go back to the same way that it's counted people since 1790: with paper and pen.

"You've got to be kidding me, right?" says an incredulous Kralik. "Why can't we get together the brightest minds at Google, at Apple, at whatever companies here in the Valley, and figure out a more high-tech way of counting our citizens?"