Harvey Kronberg
By Forrest Preece
So how did a guy from the debate team at Bellaire High in Houston become one of the 25 Most Powerful People in Texas Politics, according to Texas Monthly in 2005? A lost transcript from Hebrew University in Jerusalem had a lot to do with it.
You see, Harvey Kronberg took classes there for his junior college year abroad in 1970-71. In 1972 he applied and was accepted at UT Law School. But then the UT admissions office couldn’t obtain his transcript from that year, because Hebrew University, something of a non-computerized institution at the time, had lost it. That quashed Harvey’s ambitions to be a lawyer, sent him towards another career path, and to meeting his wife, Michele. (By the way, the transcript did show up 25 years later.) This turn of events gave the State Capitol infrastructure a voice it would not have had otherwise, and Harvey is fine with the way it all worked out.
Harvey rolled with that punch, and became an auctioneer, a participant in the Renaissance Festival, and a street vendor for a while. Then he opened a place called Just Buckles, selling fancy belt buckles, on South First in 1978. That went fine until 18% interest rates came along in 1982. A few years later, he opened Austin Flag & FlagPole, which he sold in February of 2022; but that business went soft during the oil crash and S&L implosion in 1987. Harvey and Michele had to get second jobs and then in 1991, fate smiled on him.
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to The Quorum
A friend had brought the Quorum Report, a newsletter for Texas statehouse insiders, out of bankruptcy. Suddenly, he needed an editor after the person employed in that post quit, and he asked Harvey to take the job. Thinking that he didn’t have the insider political knowledge to fill the bill, Harvey declined. But the publisher called back a few days later and made an offer that was too sweet to pass up, so Harvey agreed to give the job a try.
About eight months into the job, Harvey hit his first home run with a story critical of the plaintiff lawyers’ dominance of the Democratic Party. In that era, the business lobby was effectively forced to contribute to the plaintiff lawyers’ candidates, which then filed motions against them. The business interests at the statehouse had never felt that they were properly treated by the press corps and Harvey’s article was singing their tune.
A few days later, an executive with the tort reform lobby called him up and offered to pay for a license to do some reprints of the piece. Harvey thought they might want 300 copies of it. He was flabbergasted when they asked for 25,000 to start. “That exploded our readership. And from that moment on we were profitable.” Suddenly, Harvey had some serious visibility, and he capitalized on it.
In 1998, the owner sold The Quorum Report to Harvey and by then it was obvious that converting the distribution of the newsletter to the internet would be a necessity. Having a newsletter that arrived in subscribers’ snail-mail boxes several days or even a week after a major event happened just wasn’t cutting it. He gave some software programmers the assignment to create a system for distributing the newsletter online and to accept credit card numbers for subscriptions. When they had him up and running online it “democratized the capitol.” At that point, every officeholder and political operative in the state “knew what the speaker knew, when he knew it.” It was a game-changer and Harvey’s subscriber base quadrupled in six months. On top of that, if he found that he had made a factual error, (understandable, since he was being inundated with information) it could be corrected within an hour. When he did that, his readers realized that he was committed to fairness.
For the first three years, he was doing it all himself. One of his best steps was the introduction of the NewsClips feature, links to the hottest 36 stories around the state in the major newspapers and other outlets. Six mornings a week, lobbyists and officeholders could instantly see what was being written in Austin, DFW, Houston, San Antonio, and the rest of the state, while they were having breakfast. Harvey adds that 60% of his readership is now on cell phones and that he has political professionals in DC and executives at bond houses in New York City looking at the newsletter.
Harvey says that he is probably now the longest serving member of the capitol press corps. He still pens a weekly column and sometimes his work is quoted on the floor of the House. But he says that his writings are “radioactive” in the Senate. He says that The Quorum Report’s pushback against Dan Patrick is largely the reason that the press in general is banned from the Texas Senate floor.
Harvey Looks At Texas
Speaking to the overarching current political issues in the state, Harvey cited two things that stand out in his mind First, there is the transformation of the Republican party from being pro-business and fiscally conservative to engaging in hard-nosed cultural wars. Second, since the legislature meets only 140 out of 750 days, it forces the politicians to resolve issues in a relatively short time frame. But under the new Abbott-Patrick hardline siloing of Democrats vs. Republicans, there is very little room for compromise, which leads to stalemates.
In that same vein, elected officials are being forced to put the party line of their caucuses ahead of the wishes of the people in their district. If they don’t do that, they will face opponents that the caucuses fund in the next election cycle – not a healthy situation for a democracy.
In Harvey’s view, the Texas economic miracle started with Governor John Connally, who realized that you cannot have a world-class economy without having a world-class higher educational system – and he took steps to make that happen. Every governor – Democrat and Republican -- through Rick Perry agreed with that premise and kept it in focus. The current fight to eliminate tenure is just one example of how things have changed in that arena.
Of course, the state needs a robust workforce and infrastructure as well. Harvey’s biggest concern now is that the state’s major elected officials are destroying the seed corn for the Texas economy. He pointed to a number of major issues: defunding public schools (in a town like San Angelo, the schools have the biggest payroll), roads which are falling into disrepair statewide, an electric grid that is not secure, and tenuous water supplies.
He says that statistics show that Texas is inching towards being purple. But he gets calls from the national press asking if Texas is investible for Democrats, and he says that he doesn’t know. “The most viable statewide candidate the party has had, Beto O’Rourke, wouldn’t get on TV and go toe-to-toe with the opposition. They need some effective leadership to take back the state.”
Burning the Past-Midnight Oil
In November 2000, News 8 (now Spectrum) hired Harvey to do political analysis on the night of the Bush v. Gore presidential election. He agreed to do it, but made them promise to have him off the air by 9 p.m. National-level political VIPs were all over downtown and Harvey couldn’t miss the chance to hit the party/reception circuit and do some serious networking. When it became obvious that there was a deadlock, the News 8 execs begged him to stay on the air. By 4 a.m. the next day, he finally got to leave the studio. “I drank a lot of coffee with tabasco that night,” Harvey says.
