October 15, 2004 | Volume 1, Issue 2
Perspectives from the Campaign Trail: A Conversation with Chris Heinz
On September 8th 2004, Chris Heinz came to the Heinz School’s weekly lunchtime Convocation series to, in his words, “Talk about the best and worst of the American election experience.” He has spent the last 18 months volunteering on the presidential campaign of his step-father, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Heinz is the youngest son of Teresa Heinz Kerry and the late Senator H. John Heinz III, the namesake of the Heinz School and an admired public figure in Western Pennsylvania.
Prior to getting involved with the Kerry campaign, Heinz worked for a private equity firm in New York City. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Once on the campaign trail, Heinz initially worked as a fundraiser, a position he described as “essentially a sales job.” Heinz praised former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s on-line fundraising strategy during the early part of the Democratic primaries, and said that he felt the Internet had revolutionized the nature of campaign finance.
During the Winter of 2003, Heinz made the transition from fundraising to campaigning at the local level, spending a significant amount of time in the crucial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire. “Those residents [of Iowa and New Hampshire] approached the process with genuine interest and genuine respect,” Heinz said. “It was enlightening and it was positive. There was a sense of honesty and a hope for a better day that was, quite frankly, a little bit intoxicating.” At Convocation, he challenged the audience to think about how the local nature of politics in these states could be scaled-up into a national dialogue on important policy issues.
Heinz also elaborated on being the son of a Republican senator and now the step-son of a Democratic presidential nominee. He stressed his father’s moderate politics during his time in the Senate and said, “I don’t think partisanship was at all at the heart of who [John Heinz] was. John Kerry and John Heinz are a lot closer than John Heinz and George [W.] Bush in ideology and, I think, in spirit.”
Heinz expressed frustration with the national media’s coverage of the election. “Many people think that candidates don’t talk about the issues,” he said, “but the candidates are actually talking about their take on the state of the world every day, five times a day.” Heinz asserted that the national media had neglected to give important policy issues the attention they deserved, and had instead focused on process stories. However, he stressed, “We as voters are the only ones who can change the system, by demanding more objective reporting. As citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, let’s make it our job to probe, to ask real questions, and to demand truthful answers. Don’t let someone editorialize the political information you get. And then, most importantly, vote.”
Following the convocation, Chris Heinz took time to sit down with the Heinz School Review to provide some additional insight.
HSR: You mentioned the role that the Internet has played in this election. What are some of the challenges of using technology as a campaign tool?
CH: The Achilles’ heel of technology is that not everyone has Internet access, and that will continue to be the case for some period of time. Additionally, you’re only going to reach a self-selecting audience. For the true swing voter, the Internet probably does have the value of cross-comparison. However, the larger point is that people can self-select into communities and get the answers that they want to see and that won’t challenge their opinions.
The news sites can be a good place for that reason. I think that it would be great if the government went out there and promoted their own site: for example if the [Federal Election Commission] promoted its own site. If you had a world where everyone had Internet access and the FEC had some sort of oversight, you could have a place where people could get less biased information and usefully compare it. The problem with campaigns is that it’s always sales material. Our side is sales material, their side is sales material. I think ours is more factually driven. But I’m subjective and not afraid to admit it. I hope most people believe it too, at least over 50% of the people…
HSR: You talked about getting frustrated with the politics and way the media has addressed the campaign: not focusing on policies and issues. What issues do you feel merit greater attention?
CH: You’ll hear the people in the headlines, “John Kerry talks about the economy and healthcare,” but you won’t get any granular discussion about what specifically we’re trying to do. Every newspaper writes a good healthcare story about what we’re trying to do at some point. At some point they discuss it. But every day they write a process story. You can’t blame them for not wanting to write the healthcare story every day. It would be commercially impossible. The process is changing every day and our healthcare system is static and it has been for two years. So I understand why it’s happening. That’s why I don’t want too much media bashing, even though I am disappointed in large parts of it.
Coming out of the convention we went to a lot of tier-2 markets on our bus trip. We did that because the whole national press corps was in tow and following us closely. This meant that we’d still get national coverage, but we went to markets that later on down the line might not warrant the candidate’s time. Local press does a much better job because they don’t usually get the attention. They’ll come in and quote John Kerry and you’ll have a discussion about what the candidates are talking about. Every day the Des Moines Register, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette will pick up an AP story talking about process and editorialize it. I just don’t care about the process. I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed it but the process is almost the whole thing now. We’ve been in this campaign for two years. That’s two years of process stories.
HSR: It seems that when there’s a complex issue being addressed, it becomes easy for a candidate to be misrepresented. How do you prevent that?
CH: I think that’s exactly what the news media is responsible for doing. That’s basically my big complaint. In a democracy, the media are the accountability system. [The problem is] this corporate media. Not to sound conspiratorial about it, but that’s the way it is. We’re definitely suffering for it. It’s a collective issue. When you have all of the media on the campaign trail in two buses, sitting there together all the time, then they make the decisions together; you get a lot of risk-averse people. You don’t get a lot of Woodward and Bernstein-type investigative reporting and “I want the truth.” I think that’s the best kind of journalist.
HSR: Pennsylvania is critical election year turf. What lessons from your father’s career in this region can you apply to winning this state?
CH: Doing hard work, organizing people, being available, looking people in the eye, giving them your time. Most resources are constrained by candidate time; John has less and less time, but it’s also something that family members can do.
We have a better constituent base than my dad had. My dad had wonderful relationships with labor for a Republican, but that wasn’t the base of his support. He had more of a mixed base. For us it’s more about organizing constituent groups. We focus on elderly issues in this part of the country, and on people who are sportsmen. We’re not going to get the endorsement from the NRA, but there are two sides to the issue. If you like hunting and you like fishing, then you have to protect the environment and you have to conserve. The administration has gone backwards on those things.
What I’ve learned is that Pennsylvanians are real people and they like to get to know their candidates. My dad was really good at that. He had more town meetings per year than any other person in the Senate. He had over 580 town meetings in his career. In fact, he died on the way to a town meeting. It’s that sort of attention and one-to-one politicking that is crucial. Additionally, the campaign team on the ground in this area is better. They’ve done this before and know the area, especially the political leaders in this area. They know what’s important, more than I know.
HSR: You’ve talked about many of the issues involved in this election. What’s the biggest challenge for the campaign between now and November 2nd?
CH: Absent exogenous events, it’s us having a unified message. From my standpoint, as someone who’s working for Democrats, our party by definition is loosely defined. It’s a coalition of coalitions. Because of that, our message will always suffer because we’re offering different things to different people. So rarely are Democrats on the same page. Every different constituency has an issue which is most important to them. So for us, it’s the ability to have a message that transcends our group, to have people stick to it, sell on it and be effective. If we have a unified, simple message that is consistent, and I personally think that it’s the right message, if we deliver it right, this won’t be a close race. Meaning we should win by 6 or 7 points. If we don’t deliver the message right, if we don’t get that sort of continuity, this is going to be a replay of what happened in 2000. It’s going to be directly on the margin.
HSR: Well, that’s all the time we have. Thank you for coming to the Heinz School and sitting down to talk with us.
CH: You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed it.