For this interview, Bob Holste (PA ’83), Deputy Director of Government Relations for the Pew Charitable Trusts was interviewed by Bill Rivers (DE ’09).

Bob Holste is Deputy Director of Government Relations at The Pew Charitable Trusts, where he ensures Pew’s program initiatives are understood by state, federal and international policy makers.

Mr. Holste was a partner in a political consulting and advertising firm from 2008 until joining Pew in 2009.  Previously, he was the national coalitions director of the Rudy Giuliani for President Committee and served for over 12 years as the Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Phil English (R-PA), a member of the House Ways & Means Committee.  During this time, Mr. Holste served for three years as president of the bipartisan House Chiefs of Staff Association.  He is a veteran of numerous political campaigns across the U.S. and in his home state of Pennsylvania and headed Incumbent Retention at the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2002 and 2004.

Before coming to Washington, D.C., he served as the director of the Office of Policy and Planning in the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and as a manager in the Pennsylvania Treasury Department.

Mr. Holste serves on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania State Society and the Capitol Hill Club. He is graduate of the Pennsylvania State University with a degree in public service.

Bill Rivers is a recent graduate from the University of Delaware where he studied International Relations and History. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a 2010 Simon Fellow, he currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.

Is there a specific moment or an event in your life when you first realized you wanted a career in politics?

There wasn’t a light switch moment. My junior and senior years in high school I was a cloakroom page in Congress. It was exciting to work on the House floor. I loved it. I’ve really been doing this since I was 16.

In 2002 and 2004 you ran the GOP’s Incumbent Retention efforts in the House of Representatives, coordinating dozens of congressional candidates, with near-perfect records both times. Given that sitting Congressmen must have some strong opinions about how to best get themselves re-elected, how do you herd cats so successfully?

By keeping in mind that the effort is about the members and getting them reelected, not about you. I used to tell members the only thing I get judged on is whether or not they get reelected. I wasn’t looking for a job with any of them. I was always going to leave when the campaign ended and go back to my Hill job, which was a lot less stressful anyway. I told them frequently, “I’m just here to get you reelected.”

If you realize that races are similar but districts are different, and take the time to learn about each district, then you can be helpful. And if you’re helpful, they’re willing to listen.

In the first cycle, I also had “soft money.” That was back before McCain-Feingold. Then, we spent lots of money and everybody could find out where it came from. I’ll leave it to others to determine if it was a better system.

Is all politics local?

It depends on the cycle. You ignore local preferences at your peril. We do live in one country. As the last election made pretty clear, it is possible to be in a cycle where the election is nationalized and voters move together because they have similar concerns across districts. There is a reason every McDonald’s looks the same, and every TJ Maxx looks the same. There is value in consistency. If you’ve got double-digit unemployment in 60 out of 100 districts, don’t be surprised that every campaign will be talking about jobs and the economy.

When you know a candidate is going to lose, and your limited resources would be better spent elsewhere, how do you say ‘No’?

From the national party perspective, in a number of cases you can’t say yes or no. Candidates will get a pretty good clue when you tell them they’re not getting their coordinated funding that the parties are allowed to spend. You can’t tell them independent expenditures, but all that information is publicly available. A smart campaign tracks that. And you’ll see that as soon as a party withdraws their independent expenditures, it makes national news.

You just say, “We have deep concerns given the state of polling and what you’ve done.” You need some version of a very polite, “We told you so.” But there are consequences to bad decisions. Politics is a very Darwinian process and money is not unlimited. Candor works. Just tell the truth.

One time I had a member come in to my office and ask me about where his coordinated money went. When I told him, he responded by saying ‘I think I’ll start cleaning out my desk.’

Relating to our discussion of electoral politics, California is getting attention for its non-partisan commission to oversee redistricting efforts. One of the guidelines will be that all districts will be condensed, regardless of whether they encompass homogenous parts of a region. Does such a thing as a ‘non-partisan re-districting commission’ really exist? How should re-apportionment be handled?

I’m skeptical of nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Theoretically, I suppose its possible. It depends on how you define “fairness.” Does it mean a district will be politically competitive? This is not going to be possible in every case. Does it mean there is a reasonable chance that a district will send minority representation to Congress? We know there’s a reasonable chance they won’t if compactness is the standard. Re-districting is not a panacea if what you want is more challenging, competitive races.

I think we can look to states like Iowa for a reasonable, successful nonpartisan redistricting effort. They’ve managed to get a lot of the partisanship out of their process.  In 2000, Iowa’s 5 congressional seats were all re-districted. They rotated them like a clock. All the members ended up with 45-60% of their district being new constituents. Functionally, it turned every one of them into freshmen congressmen and Iowa into a national target. What followed was a hard fought battle, with a lot of national media attention. And do you know what happened? Every incumbent was reelected.

What would be a more sustainable approach—though this is asking a lot—would be to generate elected officials who were more sympathetic to alternative political points of view. You want officials worried about what their general electorate thinks, not just their primary electorate. On balance, that would be useful for the country. But recognize there’s no one-stop solution. We have an increasingly contentious electorate.

Why is that? Is it because of Gerrymandering? Or is there really some schism in the American soul?

Gerrymandering definitely makes it worse. That’s all about packing and cracking. If districts are all packed, then anybody just has to win the primary. Generally speaking, Gerrymandering is a bad thing. But when 45 percent of the country comes down on one side of an issue, and 45 percent on the other, that means there’s great division.  You shouldn’t be surprised that your Congress is reasonably representative of that.

What we’re seeing now, I think, is the end of forty-year majorities. The electorate is comprised of divided, free actors. We’re a three party nation with a two party system.

Your work with the GOP didn’t end in 2004. In 2007 the Giuliani Presidential Campaign named you their National Coalitions Director. What’s the first thing you did when you took the job?

After finding a place to live in Jersey City? The campaign had no existing coalition structure at all. The first thing to do was to get some staff in Iowa and New Hampshire, and later in Florida. Then it was bringing volunteers into a coordinated structure. The campaign ended up with over forty different coalition groups of which Women for Rudy and Students for Rudy were the biggest. Once you get organized, you have to task your volunteers. That means millions of phone calls.

Would you have done anything differently?

Sure. How much time do you have?  If we had to do it over again, I think we would have skipped Iowa. Giuliani was a centrist candidate and caucus states just aren’t good for that. Iowa is a fundraiser, not a poll. You’re lucky if you get two percent of the electorate to show up at the polls. And most of the people who win the caucus go on to lose, both the nomination and the White House. New Hampshire is much more predictive because it’s an actual primary. You get higher levels of voter participation and a more representative electorate. A caucus is easily highjack-able by special interests.

What do you think is the driving force behind the two major political parties in the United States today?

The Republican Party is more homogenous than the Democrats in terms of membership. Its policy base is a small businessman in Ohio. The Democratic Party is a coalition. Its policy base is a union shop steward in Indiana who works for a public sector labor union. You see these positions playing out in the positions of each party.

Take taxes for example. Republicans worry about capital gains, estate taxes, and tax breaks for the rich because most small business people are sub-chapter S, which means they pay taxes at the personal rate not the corporate rate.

I was approached once by a small business owner who made $350,000 a year, out of which he paid 9 employees. But because he made $350,000, he was considered ‘rich’ and he personally was taxed for it. He told me, “If they raise my tax rates, I’m firing people.”

You currently serve as Deputy Director of Government Relations for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Now that you’re outside the partisan political realm, what do you see as your greatest challenge?

The challenge for any downtown group, but especially for Pew, is to get on the agenda for Congress and then move your issues through. If you look at some of Pew’s major issues—food safety, antibiotic protection and research, financial market reforms to protect consumers—everyone’s for that. But there’s a big difference between everyone being for it and actually getting on the floor of the House and build a bill that people can get around. Especially if you don’t have a PAC and aren’t likely to have one.

Pew has to form coalitions and work with like-minded individuals across party lines to help convene people who together are loud enough to command the attention of political leaders in Congress and the Administration to put issues front and center and get them moved.

I couldn’t find anybody who was for salmonella in their eggs. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people opposed to the food safety bill. It’s not that their objectives are illegitimate. It’s just that in our view, they were too focused on their concerns and not enough on the public’s concerns.

So you’re still in politics?

Everything’s political in that sense. There are legitimate policy differences that have to be overcome. And in a process that’s designed to be difficult to pass laws (the Founding Fathers really nailed that), that’s the principal challenge: punching through and being persuasive enough.

One of the Trust’s founders, Joseph N. Pew, famously remarked that if elected President of the United States, he would “Tell the truth and trust the people.” Given the recent Wikileaks headlines, how do you determine when telling the truth and trusting the people is harmful?

There is a place for secrecy in statecraft and there is a place for public discourse and the free flow of information in a democracy. We’ve managed to find a balance for 200 years. I’m sure we’ll be able to do it now.

I’d obviously draw a pretty bright line between Wikileaks and Pew. Pew’s advocacy is founded on a solid principle of action: When the facts are clear and the case is compelling and we think that Pew’s intervention would make a difference, then we will engage in advocacy supported by our nonpartisan research. I think most people would agree that knowledge is good, but it needs to come in context. I’m all for making the government tell me what they’re doing, but not if servicemen and women are going to get killed in Kandahar.

The Pew Research Center studies, among a host of issues, American civic literacy. How would you rate the average American in this regard?

If we’re talking about electoral politics, people can be stupid but voters are smart.  I am not in the voters are stupid category. When you get large numbers of them, in the aggregate, they tend to get it right. You get on thin ice when you assert that it’s dumb voters making dumb decisions that are to blame. The “voters are stupid speech” starts with what the question “What other explanation could there be for their failure to see my point of view?”

There’s a reason stuff happens. I’ve seen people lose that I thought should have won. Sometimes you get caught in a wave and it’s not fair. But if voters are going to change the direction of the country, they’re going to fire a whole bunch of people. Sometimes voters want to change and the decision is above your pay grade. And they have lots of opportunities to change their mind. We have elections every two years.

There’s an old adage that says “You are what you read.” As someone who’s been highly successful in electoral politics and in the non-profit world, what are you reading right now? What are your favorite books?

I just finished Last Call, a political history of the rise and fall of prohibition in the United States. It’s an absolutely terrific book. I really recommend it to students in the process. It’s history at its finest. It gets back to the previous question of civic literacy: How could such a colossally dumb idea actually get called into being in a democratic country? It describes the rise of single-issue politics in the States and what I think was the most powerful political organization in the United States, the Anti-Saloon League. The NRA on its best day couldn’t hope to achieve that kind of influence.

Last question: One of your Truman classmates, Chris Coons, was just elected to the US Senate from my home state of Delaware. Can you say you knew him when?

Well, we didn’t have Truman Leadership Week when Chris and I were selected.  We didn’t get that class consciousness that recent Trumans are able to have. When we were selected, Scholars flew out to Missouri for two days. We spent the first at the Presidential Library, and had our ceremony the following day. The Leadership week is really a great experience that we didn’t get to have.

Bill Rivers (DE ’09) currently directs marketing and fundraising for Water Is Life-Kenya, (www.kenyawaterislife.com) a Delaware-based non-profit dedicated to developing clean, sustainable water resources in Southern Kenya.