National Senior Vice President,
Federal Advocacy
American Heart Association

Let’s get this out of the way: How is Holubowich pronounced?

I’m glad you asked. I’ve heard it butchered, even when I’m introduced as a speaker at events. The accent is on the “lub” with a long “u.” “Wich” is pronounced like “sandwich,” not “sandwick.”

When you were growing up on Cape Cod, did you daydream about spending your career in health policy analysis?

It never entered my mind. I loved horses, so I thought I was going to be a jockey, then a veterinarian. I was good at chemistry, but it didn’t take me long when I was in college to discover that lab life was not for me. This was at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which is a state college, not the Dartmouth in New Hampshire, which is an Ivy League school. I switched to political science, which you can say changed my life.

In what way?

My intro to political science was taught by Dr. Robert Hackey, who was an expert on health policy. We studied what he called “the politicization of disease,” which was fascinating. We looked at how our public response to disease depends on who is affected by them — the difference between our response to Legionnaires’ disease, for example, and AIDS. I was hooked and have spent 25 years of my career in health policy analysis.

We’re speaking on the morning after the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. Without asking who you think “won,” do you have any thoughts on the debate — and the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris?

We all remember hearing about the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate, which was a turning point in that presidential campaign and in American political history. In part, that was because the debate was on TV and so many people watched it. But so much has changed since then that I wonder how much these debates matter at this point in our history. Today we all walk around with little TVs in our pocket, right? We can watch clips anytime we want, and what might happen on one of those debates might be less important than what goes viral. Anything surprising or maybe newsworthy goes viral. We can watch that anytime we want. So in a sense what matters is how an event like this is portrayed afterward. Even so, the debate between Vance and Walz was interesting and in a way refreshing.

How so?

I noticed, for example, that Jimmy Kimmel said the debate was “boring.” To me, that was good. Politics has devolved into entertainment. It has become a blood sport, like WWF. The more confrontational you are, the more attention you get, so being confrontational is incentivized. And I guess some people could find the vice presidential debate boring because it was conducted with civility and decorum, with a lot of discussion of policy. Politics too often now is about “owning the opposition,” and too little about actual governing.

So you found this more civil debate encouraging?

I did. There has always been conflict in politics, and there should be. But when I first came to Washington 25 years ago, there was a genuine understanding of the need to reach across the aisle. Being able to work with people from the other political party was considered necessary. To get anything done, you had to be able to compromise and not to consider compromise a dirty word or an abandonment of principle. To get reelected, you had to be able to show results. Today, by contrast, you are incentivized for being outrageous. And I think social media and C-Span are in part a big factor in this shift.