Brent Colburn on Sanders, Trump, and the Future of Campaigns

Brent Colburn has served as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the Chief of Staff of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. He was the National Communications Director for President Obama’s 2012 campaign. Colburn is currently a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.
Harvard Political Review: What influenced your decision to be a fellow for the Institute of Politics, and what is the goal of your study group?
Brent Colburn: Most of my career has been a mix of working on political campaigns—in my case, the Democratic side—and working on the administration for President Obama over the last seven years. So what I want to do with my study group is really look at the differences and similarities in working on a campaign versus working in the administration: kind of what it takes to get elected versus what it takes to get something done once you are elected—and really pull the strings on where there are overlaps and also where there are differences. In terms of what influenced me to do it, it’s an amazing program. A lot of the fellows I know, and folks that have done it before, say that it’s the best experience they’ve ever had professionally. So when the opportunity arose, it was just something that I thought I couldn’t pass up.
Your previous experiences as the communications director for Obama’s campaign and as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs heavily involved the media and the public opinion. But how is campaigning different from governing?
Campaigns in many ways are pretty straightforward. And what I mean by that is that you have a single, unifying goal. Everything that you’re doing on a campaign is focused on one day, the election day, and having one outcome, and that’s to get more votes than your opponent does. So, it simplifies the work and it makes it much easier to make decisions about allocation of resources, emphasis points: everything’s towards one, central goal. Once you get elected, you have competing priorities across the entire government, so the time that you spend on foreign policy is going to take away time that you spend on domestic policy. A jobs crisis can interrupt your desire to get things done on the social side of the ledger, say, criminal justice reform or environmental issues. So there’s a lot of tradeoffs in terms of resource allocation and time allocation when you’re governing.
There’s also a difference in the size and scope. The campaign in 2012 was the most expensive campaign to date – we spent about $750 million total to get the president reelected. That’s a lot of money, but if you compare that to the budget of the federal government, which is trillions of dollars, you’re talking a totally different scale. I think we had about 4,000 paid employees in the Obama campaign and about 32,000 volunteers. I think there are nearly 5 million employees in the federal government. So they’re very, very different in terms of their scope.
You mentioned that your leadership was somewhat seen as temporary—how did that affect the work dynamics? 
When you’re a political appointee, you have a very limited amount of time that you would be in that position. So folks that are in those jobs today know the longest they’ll most likely serve is through January 20, 2017. And [on Inauguration Day] at noon, and a new group of folks will come in, and they’ll kind of hand the keys over. So it creates a real sense of urgency on trying to get things done.
And it also means that you need to get by with some folks who may not have come in with the same passion for the president that you may have. They may have competing agendas of their own in terms of what they think is best for the department, or what they think is best for policy perspectives, so it puts a much larger premium on teambuilding and on bringing a lot of voices to the process.
There’s also just a much larger bureaucracy to deal with, so you have a sense of urgency, but things inherently go slower. And that tension can get very hard to navigate, but it’s an incredibly rewarding once you’re able to actually get through those few hoops.
So what would make a communication or public affairs strategy successful?
You have to have a clearly defined goal. Planning is an incredibly important part. Most of the plans will get interrupted at some point by some outside factors that you’re not planning on or that you’re that expecting, but if you don’t have the plan in the first place, you don’t have any template to build off of. And then I think that the teambuilding piece of it is crucially important, and making sure that you have the resources matched against the goal.
Social media has become a gigantic part of our lives. Has that been a positive or negative impact on campaigning and governing in terms of public affairs?
Well, positive or negative, it’s just reality. It’s something that you have to deal with on a daily basis. On the campaign side of things, it opens up a whole new set of avenues to talk directly to voters, which is a huge benefit. You no longer have to work just through the media to get your message out. You could do that through very defined and very focused and targeted messages to individuals that want to follow you on social media. There are people that are passionate about what you’re doing, and so you can use them as the messengers to go talk to their friends and family and really try to spread the message. So on the campaign side, it’s been a huge advantage.
On the government side, because there’s that bureaucracy in place, we have not done as good of a job of leveraging those tools to talk directly to the American people. I think it’s something that everyone in government is struggling with. The president is working hard right now with the United States Digital Service that he started about a year and a half ago to make sure that the digital tools that the government is using are as up to date as possible.
But this goes back to the management differences of the two worlds. On a campaign, it’s easy to hire the best when it comes to social media—and you know, the best at social media are maybe 23 years old, and there are folks that are living it on a daily basis. They’re the ones that are inventing these tool [which are] an integrated part of their life. But because of the way that we have to hire people in the federal government, sometimes it’s very hard to get those people into the positions in government where they can really change the government to really use those tools in an effective way. So that’s something that we struggle with throughout the administration. I hope that we’re getting better at it, but it remains a challenge.
There seems to be a rising support for candidates who are antiestablishment, like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. What makes their campaign strategies successful, and how do you think that would affect the 2016 elections? 
I’m actually the outlier who doesn’t think that there’s a lot of relationship between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. I’m sure some of my colleagues would disagree. But taking them separately, I’m sure you can see with Senator Sanders, there is a left part of the Democratic Party that is constantly looking for a champion in the Democratic primary process. You can go back to every single primary that’s happened, and there’s almost always a rise from the left. You saw Bill Bradley in 2000 rise against Al Gore in this way, you saw Howard Dean—who I worked for in 2003 and 2004—be very successful for a while. Ironically, Governor Dean was not particularly liberal, but took very liberal positions on the war and on civil unions, which was the precursor for the gay marriage debate.
So what I see there is really Senator Sanders capturing the energy that always exists and doing a very good job of trying to grow that out. But that’s really a phenomenon that I think you would have seen happen regardless of what was happening in the Republican primary. Donald Trump, you know, I think there’s a few things that are going on in the Trump phenomenon. I think some of it has to do with America’s fascination with celebrity. Some of it is, I think he’s been treated differently by the press than the other candidates have because he is not a traditional elected official or candidate. He seems to be able to get away with saying things that other people would be held accountable for in a very interesting way. He’s also willing to say whatever it takes in the moment to get people to get excited about him.
If there truly is an outsider candidate that’s tapping into a frustration with the system, that’s more of a Trump phenomenon than I think one that you’re seeing on both sides of the aisle. I think the important thing to remember is that if you look at the rhythm of presidential primaries in the United States, there is usually a settling out that happens in the fall, heading into the caucuses and the first primary in New Hampshire, where sometimes these candidates that are in the extremes or that are slightly outsider candidates start to lose support, and more conventional start to gain support as we get close to people who actually cast their votes. So, time will tell: every election is different. But that would be what’s interesting to watch, to see if that happens as we move into the winter.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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