Strategic Communications in the Biden White House, Part II: A Conversation with Herbie Ziskend

Senior Podcast Editor Sneha Choudhary (MPP ‘24) sits down with Herbie Ziskend, Special Assistant to the President and White House Deputy Communications Director, to discuss his experiences as a young staffer in the Obama Administration, his current role in the Biden Administration, and trends in political communication.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:

SNEHA CHOUDHARY:  Hey, and welcome back to the Georgetown Public Policy Review podcast. I’m your host, Sneha Choudhary, and today I am really excited to unveil the second part of a two part conversation with the White House Deputy Communications Directors earlier this month. Last episode, I spoke with Jen Molina about strategic communications and coalitions media And in today’s episode, I’m speaking with Herbie Ziskind about his experiences as a young staffer in the Obama administration, his current role in the Biden administration, and how political communications has changed since the dawn of social media.

Herbie is Special Assistant to the President of the United States of America, and Deputy Communications Director at the White House. He has over a decade of experience in both political and corporate communications, and we had some really insightful conversation regarding the future of communications. I’m excited for you all to get a chance to listen to our conversation and learn a little bit more from Herbie.

So without further ado, let’s get started. 

CHOUDHARY: Hi Herbie. Thank you for coming on the podcast today. 

ZISKEND: Thank you for having me. 

CHOUDHARY: I really appreciate you making the time for me to be here. I know you’re super busy. For the listeners context, we are sitting in the West Wing looking out to the entrance of the White House, which is kind of a surreal experience, and I’m sure you feel that way too. There are so many different things I want to talk to you about today, but I would love to just start with the basics of what made you decide to go into politics? 

ZISKEND: Well, I was always interested in politics and government, but ultimately when I was younger, what I was really interested in was sports, Boston sports, my high school sports, I played football and baseball, grew up outside of Boston.

And that was my main focus. But towards the end of high school in my junior year, that’s when 9/11 happened, which really drew my attention as a 16 year old into politics, into government, into the world. And then when I went off to college, the 2004 election, those things altogether really drew me in even more and made me really interested in this and excited about it.

My parents didn’t work in politics, they weren’t really involved in politics, they voted and had, and were interested and read the news and were informed, but politics was not the main event, but I just got hooked. I got hooked towards the end of high school and really haven’t looked back. 

CHOUDHARY: So you started your career as a press assistant in the Obama White House, working for then Vice President Biden.

When I was doing some research for this interview, I was Googling your name and I’m scrolling down and I see this article in the New York Times. It’s like a profile piece and it’s called the 20 somethings of the Obama White House. And I see you, and some of the other people from that time. And I think that really just speaks to what a cultural reset President Obama’s administration was and how that really drew people into politics. For some people it’s what ignited the fire in them for the first time. So can you just talk a little bit about what it was like to be a young person working in that White House? What your press experience was like in your early career and how that kind of translates into what you do today?

ZISKEND: Well, so I was a senior. I was a senior in college in 2007 when the 2008 presidential campaign was kicking off and I remember being in my dorm room in Ithaca, New York, I went to Cornell, and I was in my dorm room and I saw the announcement that Obama was running. I saw his announcement in Springfield and I just was excited.

I had been following him. I was drawn to him. It was a very idealistic campaign, idealistic moment. And so I started driving my 20 year old car from Ithaca to New Hampshire to volunteer on the Obama campaign the second half of my senior year of college. And I did, I entered data into spreadsheets and did research, traveled around the advance team to help set up events.

And when I graduated, I was offered a job on the advanced team where I traveled the country. with Senator Obama setting up events, getting new shirts if David Axelrod spilled ketchup on his shirt, hanging the hope sign. It was like the lowest level job in the campaign, but I loved it. I got to see the country.

I got to travel to all these places that you don’t go unless you’re on a campaign. Places like Kokomo, Indiana and Eugene, Oregon and Peoria, Illinois, places that I had a chance to visit and meet people and watch this campaign blossom into kind of a startup into this massive. Exciting operation. And obviously the Senator Obama became the nominee and then ultimately won.

But in the final few months of the campaign, they created the Vice President  ial nominee team for whoever they would pick. And I became the traveling staff assistant to whoever. the VP nominee would be. The VP nominee became Senator Biden, and I worked for Senator Biden from the day he was announced as the VP nominee, and I traveled with him everywhere he went for those two and a half months in the general election, and it was incredibly exciting.

It was the final stretch of the campaign. I was the youngest person on the plane with press and the staff and the Senator and Secret Service. And basically I was like getting the luggage, printing out his speeches last minute, running, running errands and various tasks, but it was a front row seat to history and to the end of this really exciting campaign.

And then when we won, I immediately moved to D. C. and I worked in the transition office for Vice President elect Biden doing press and policy and putting together his briefing book every night and then joined his team on day one working for Vice President Biden and I worked for him over the next couple of years.

So that’s how I got my start.

CHOUDHARY: So can you think of any particularly character building moments from that period of time where at the time you were like, this is literally the worst thing that could have happened. But now you look back and you’re like, I’m actually stronger because I’ve had that experience.

ZISKEND: Well, one of the things that happens in a campaign that you don’t realize when you’re 21, 22, 23, 25, is that you actually have awesome responsibilities that are like Responsibilities are so much bigger than if you were working, say, in corporate America. But I didn’t know at the time. It’s like youthful naivete.

And so there were just periods in that campaign where I had a lot of responsibility at various times and I just didn’t fully appreciate it. I remember on Super Tuesday in, I guess this was February, January or February of 08, and Senator, Senator Obama was doing satellite interviews all over the country before Super Tuesday.

Actually, coincidentally, in Newton, Massachusetts, where I’m from, so I was like the advanced guy with him. Putting together all these interviews in this little studio where he did the satellite hits. And I remember we couldn’t get in touch with the team in Chicago and like there had been scheduling changes.

So I was just picking which media markets he should do interviews on in Super Tuesday as like a 23 year old. And these are the types of moments that happen all throughout the course of a campaign.But, ultimately that’s what it is. It’s sort of a bunch of people who try to figure out how to get stuff done.

You’re given a set of responsibilities, but you got to figure out how to do each task. Some are big and strategic. Some are, some are not. 

CHOUDHARY: You’re building the plane while it’s flying. 

ZISKEND: Totally, totally, totally. 

CHOUDHARY: So you talked a little bit about your press experience, I remember having a conversation during my internship with one of the deputy press secretaries and she described press as knife fighting with reporters every day. So can you talk a little bit about, first of all, for listeners who might not be familiar, a bit of the difference between press and comms, but also beyond that, any lessons you learned from being in press that you now feel like really benefit you working in comms and having the role you have right now?

ZISKEND:Well, they’re very much one thing. I think the distinction between press and comms is a little bit outdated. I’m the deputy communications director, but I work all day long with our amazing colleagues on the press team and on the comms team. And so it’s very much one team. The biggest distinction is that the press secretary, the deputy press secretaries, the assistant press secretaries.

They’re at the line with the press all day long. They’re going back and forth. They’re managing stories. That’s the explicit part of what their job is, and it’s a very important job. The communications team, high level, is strategically planning the message, what the framing should be.

And the schedule. So what should we do strategically and when and how, and how do we describe it? Now we also will sometimes deal with the reporters. The press team also does comps, strategic building and strategic scheduling. So it’s very much one team, but I think that it’s important to have perspective on both.

When I worked for Vice President Harris, I did a lot more day to day in that job working with reporters and it’s important to understand their perspective, understand how they’re thinking about the world, thinking about the policy that they’re covering, and it’s also important to be able to know how to frame a message and how to articulate what the President or the Vice President   or whatever principle is doing.

And so I think they’re both very complimentary to have both of those perspectives. 

CHOUDHARY: Following the Obama administration, Herbie pivoted to the corporate sector, working as Chief of Staff at the Huffington Post, later working for AOL founder Steve Case, and then moving on to SKDK, a political PR firm right here in Washington, DC.

But by this point, Herbie already had the bug. And when President Biden announced his plans to run, Herbie was more than ready to get back into the game. And as fate would have it, his first role in the Biden Administration was actually in the same office where he began his career –  Office of the Vice President. 

ZISKEND: I have a perspective on this that I did not set out to have, but I now have, which is that I’ve worked for two first term Vice Presidents, two excellent Vice Presidents, Vice President   Biden and Vice President Harris.

People often ask about how different were the two and I actually think there’s a lot more similarity and overlap the modern vice presidency and the modern Vice President,  really since Walter Mondale was Vice President, has played a very important role, a complementary role to the president, and has served as a partner on key issues.

And if you look at Vice President Harris, and I experienced this when I worked for her, as I did with Vice President Biden, she has played a really important role. Look at the issues that she’s led on. On high speed internet, making sure that every American has access to high speed internet. On reproductive healthcare, leading the fight on reproductive rights coming out of the Supreme Court’s decision last year. She has been a key player on that, a key voice and really the mark, the leader in this administration on that issue. She has met with at this point over 125 plus world leaders. I was with her when she went to the Munich security conference on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when she met with President Zelensky just days before, when she met with the secretary general of NATO, when she met with world leaders to help President Biden build this coalition to build a sanctions regime. If Putin were to invade, which of course he did a few days later, she has played such an important role domestically and internationally. And really, I think it, part of it is, she works for a former Vice President   who I think has that perspective that you can only have from doing the job for eight years.

On what it means to, to do that job. Well, she has been unflinchingly 100 percent loyal to president Biden. She has been key in getting the message out across the country, key in engaging Americans and all the communities that she visits. I think I saw something like she’s been to 17 states this summer alone.

Really playing a very important role and she brings a perspective as the person who led the justice department in California, the biggest justice department in the country when she was attorney general, a Senator on Senate intelligence, she brings a perspective from the Western States.

She’s, there’s a lot of important components in the bipartisan infrastructure law, which were issues that she led on as a Senator, like removing lead pipes. And so her fingerprints are all over a very successful first few years, for the Biden Harris administration. And I think when you’re Vice President, one of the hardest things is you’re serving the larger team.

You’re serving the administration. And so sometimes you do a lot and it feels like people say, well, I don’t know what the Vice President is doing. That’s not unique to this Vice President. I think it’s more unique to the office itself or it’s germain to the office itself. But I have seen her play a really, really critically important role.

And it’s been, it’s been fun to watch her on the other side of now working back on president Biden’s team, but also it was an honor to work for her and watch her in action over that first year and a half. 

CHOUDHARY: For sure. So pivoting a little bit. Kind of talking about social media and how comms have just changed over the past, two administrations, well, three, but, President Obama was obviously the first president to widely utilize social media, and social media’s influences only compounded since then.

So how has social media and streaming platforms changed political communications fundamentally? And how are you and the rest of the team just trying to keep up with that? 

ZISKEND: Well, it’s changed dramatically. And I will say that throughout history and throughout American political history, as medi  s become invented, become mainstream, they change the way presidents communicate.

Of course, when the radio went mainstream, you saw how President Roosevelt used it. The television, really Kennedy, President Kennedy was the first one to really fully leverage the media  that was television, cable 1990s.

And then certainly the proliferation of the internet in the, in the early 2000s and beyond. And I think if you look at the arc of this time period, the internet was commercialized in the early nineties. It really, really took off by the end of the 1990s. In a previous job, I worked for the founder of AOL, Steve Case for several years and Steve was.

AOL was really the front door of the internet, or he really led the commercialization of the internet. And by the early two thousands, when the shift came to, from dial up to broadband, eventually the internet becoming mobile, becoming ubiquitous, that really changed the paradigm. And when Obama took office in January of 09, I think the iPhone was a couple of years old by then.

But the internet wasn’t fully ubiquitous and mobile the way it is today. By the end of the Obama presidency, and certainly by the time President Biden took office, everyone has a smartphone. Everybody’s engaging with content on their phones for hours a day. Linear television is on a steady decline. And really, especially in recent years.

And by linear television, I mean people getting cable packages and turning on the, turning on to watch a show at a given time. But streaming really took off in the time that he was president. And that’s had an effect on viewership on cable and it’s had an effect on how people and when people are consuming information.

You would go home at night and you’d watch the evening news or you might watch cable to get your news diet, but now you want to watch Netflix. So, it’s on us here. On the communications team at the White House to really think about what are the messages we want and then who are the people that we’re trying to message to and how do we get to them.

And so, depending on the demographics, depending on where the person lives. Sometimes it might be through social media. Sometimes it might be through influencers and engaging with influencers. It might be a David Muir interview on World News Tonight. It also might be through a podcast. And so, you’re constantly having to change and figure out the right way to leverage the media as you have them in the moment.

It’s certainly true that our tactics have changed, but the overall strategy of communicating from the white house, what the president’s doing, what his policy priorities are. that hasn’t changed. It’s just how we’re trying to get the message out. That’s the biggest change in recent years.

CHOUDHARY: Exactly, exactly. And so you started to allude to influencers and social media engagement. I think that’s particularly important as we start to see Gen Z coming out and voting in droves. So what is the strategy around engaging Gen Z and how are you trying to be mindful about baking that into your rollouts and different things that you’re communicating as an administration?

ZISKEND: Well, we are very mindful of the fact that the places where Gen Z voters are getting their Gen Z Americans are getting their news. is different from say baby boomers and it’s a mobile first generation. It’s a digitally native generation. What the content that they are able to see and sift through is just different from other segments.

And so we have a very phenomenal digital team. We’re actually sitting in The digital head of digital’s office right now, Christian Tom, he’s not here. 

CHOUDHARY: Thanks for letting us use your office!

ZISKEND: So we’ll send him a bill later, but we have this excellent team that works not only to get the president’s message out, get the administration’s message out, across different platforms, but also engage with the types of influencers who people follow, and they might not go to for their digital, for their political content.  The president did an interview several months ago, with the SmartLess podcast. It’s huge viewership, huge reach, not the type of place you might expect to go listen to a presidential interview.

We recently did an interview with the weather channel. That’s not a Gen Z oriented outlet, but people go to the weather channel to learn about extreme weather about hurricanes. There’s also a big digital play. And so we’re constantly thinking about how we take these different messages to different segments and Gen Z like boomers, like millennials.

We think about where they are, what the issues are that matter to them, and then how do we reach them? 

CHOUDHARY: Now we’ll move to the final part of the interview, the rapid fire questions. So, the first question, and this is barring both President Biden and President Obama, is who is your favorite president of all time? 

ZISKEND: President Lincoln. And I am a huge Civil War buff and gotta go with Lincoln.

CHOUDHARY:I think that’s a good answer. Okay, next one. If you weren’t in policy or politics. What career would you pursue instead, based on our earlier part of the conversation? I feel like you would want to be a football player or a baseball player, is that correct? 

ZISKEND: Well, definitely be a football player or a baseball player.

I don’t think I have the speed or the size, unfortunately. So I would say high school baseball coach or high school football coach. 

CHOUDHARY: Very all-American of you. Okay, next one. Three words to describe yourself when you started your career. 

ZISKEND: Green. Enthusiastic. Curious. 

CHOUDHARY: Okay, three words to describe yourself now.

ZISKEND: Not as green. Enthusiastic and curious.

CHOUDHARY: Okay, and for the last question, this is a question I ask everybody who comes on the podcast. What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career? 

ZISKEND: I think to make sure that when you’re lucky to do these types of jobs, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do the job I have now, to do previous jobs in government, to take it in, to try to spend time with the people that you’re working with day in and day out, get to know them well, spend time talking to the person you meet who’s about to go meet with your boss, and you’re, you’re doing a hundred things at once and you want to just focus on the task, but say hello, connect.

These are incredible jobs and the opportunities are rare and I think just having a chance to take it in and get to know the people that you’re interacting with would be the top advice I would give myself. 

CHOUDHARY: I think that’s really good advice and I plan to take that with me as I move forward. So, thank you so much Herbie for your time today.

I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you having me on campus, and I hope I get to see you again soon.

ZISKEND: Thank you so much for having me.