Otherwise, I would kill myself. Which is to say that Buttigieg may know seven languages and carry around Ulysses and sit in with the South Bend Orchestra on piano, but as far as his top aide is concerned, it is only because he has an extra year on her. David Freedlander writes about politics and culture. Part of it with him is the persona. She is operating on two and a half hours of sleep, having just arrived back in New York on a charter jet from South Bend, Indiana, after Buttigieg announced he was running for president. [21][22][23] In 2022, Smith became a communications adviser for Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow. After 20 campaigns flacking for candidates such as Transportation Secretary and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, former Virginia Gov. We knew the McKinsey stuff would be it, but he was bound by an NDA. Pete helped pull back that part of me, because while that might work when youre dealing in the New York tabloids, that doesnt sell as well in the Des Moines Register. Weve got that Joey Burrow swag, but he does have humility to him. And its really heartening because you realize the future of the Democratic Party is really bright, and that all we need to do is help lift these people up. Yeah. Meet the DNC dark horse: Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg is shaking up the race for Democratic chair, added Salon. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. Sign up for POLITICO Magazines email of the weeks best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. The whole saga also taught her the rhythms of the New York tabloids, which have similarities to the national political press. Because he was a badass. | Politics has a bias toward the status quo, she says. So the Post is about to report that Im dating Eliot Spitzer. And you know what their problem is? That is not the typical relationship of adviser to political principal, but typical is not a word people use about Smith. In the past several months, Buttigieg has been not just all over cable and in the newspapers, but in Our Daily Planet, an environmental morning newsletter with just over 5,000 Twitter followers; in a financial planning podcast called Pete the Planner; and on West Wing Weekly, the obsessive episode-by-episode podcast breakdown of The West Wing. Wren: Tell me about that five percent credited to you. She was also communications director for Dan Seals' 2008 Illinois House race. It was a long shot. Andrew Cuomo's. Also how many, like, mind-games campaigns are playing with others. "[30] Some critics felt that it minimized her role in discrediting the sexual assault allegations against Cuomo. [20] She was a senior advisor on Corey Johnson's 2021 campaign for New York City Comptroller, and raised $3.5 million in funds for a PAC supporting Andrew Yang's 2021 mayoral campaign. Smith: Oh, thats simple. He was a once-in-a-generation talent, someone who perfectly met the moment. So I wanted to write a book to tell people, Hey, if you want to know what politics is like the ins and outs, the good, bad, and the ugly this is a book for you.. The one thing you saw on our campaign in 2020 is that everywhere we went, he was introduced by young leaders, young mayors. In the car, wed go back and forth on random trivia, and pulling up things on Google. Then there was what I did next: jumped off the cliff. Smith: Mayor Pete is where Mayor Pete is now because Mayor Pete is just one of the most uniquely talented members of the Democratic Party. I wasnt born yesterday. Smith has been exploring the idea of renting a bus, and just as McCain did, inviting reporters aboard to travel and fire away at Buttigieg with any question they want, all day, day after day. He's on his way into a black car to do Maddow. Read on for more details on the relationship that cost Smith her job, who she has dated since, and what shes up to these days. I had that early rush of love on the brainI wasnt thinking clearly. Lets just blow it out. When Smith signed on to help Mayor Pete run for DNC chair, it was a part-time gighelping a candidate nobody had ever heard of run for an insider position, the kind of job decided not by the public, but in backrooms by the most hardcore party loyalists. [19], In 2020, Smith was one of six political experts named as fellows by the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. I romanticize it. I fucking love John McCain. Can I tell you something very off the record, she texts. She texts the buzziest bits to her sprawling network of journalistic contacts, who tweet them out. I really did feel he treated me as an equal. I figured he was special and it couldnt hurt if everybody knows who he is.. Maybe a story that would be 80-20 bad you can get down to 60-40 bad, and that little bit is worth it.. This is what day one looks like. Candidates and the people around them can get so spun up about things, and when you get spun up you make the worst mistakes, she says. Both Miller and Smith come off as quasi-heros, semi-savants, pseudo-sociologists. Smith: We check in here and there. Before getting involved with Spitzer, Smith allegedly became romantic with Jeff Smith, who she reportedly met at Dartmouth while he was working as her professor. Pete was completely different. You have to know the social media ecosystem, how people are sharing and consuming their news. Its about getting to know people and them getting to know you, Buttigieg says when I see him after the Brooklyn fundraiser, where he at least pretends to recall our earlier meeting and what we talked about. It gives me so much joy when I sit down for a Zoom with Mallory McMorrow which is supposed to be 15 minutes and it turns into two hours, and I get goosebumps again. We needed to be the antidote to him. It was in 2013, the time when Smith was working for the de Blasio campaign, that she began dating Eliot Spitzer. Lis knew that she had to build wide to build up, said Stephanie Cutter, who also worked on Obamas 2012 effort. On Sunday, Bill de Blasio put out a statement in a New York Post story in his own name defending himself against the portrait you paint of him in your book as obsessively paranoid. If you were working for him, and a book like yours came out authored by someone else, how would you have advised him to address the situation? Riley Keough's husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, revealed the couple welcomed a baby girl while he gave a speech on behalf of his wife during a memorial service for Lisa Marie Presley on Sunday By. So many flacks lose their mind over inconsequential things, and have no sense of, This is good press, this is mediocre press, and this is awful press. That is something you know once you have been through awful press., As a flack, you dont always understand what it feels like to be a principal, what it feels like to be under scrutiny. Smith marched him to the front of where the national and New York press were gathered, telling him, Are you ready for your first gaggle? He stayed until the matter was exhausted. Why that works with Pete, whatever you want to call it the earnest side of him, this nerdy side of him, the wonky side of him was because it was authentically Pete. That means that shes held to a different standard than sometimes other candidates. To avoid stakeouts during the media frenzy that followed, Smith said she temporarily stayed with a friend from her college days at Dartmouthwho resided on the Upper West Side. Maybe they wont focus on the former reigning champion [Spitzer], for once. Hes someone I ask for advice. Alums [of the campaign] are on the Hill. Bill de Blasio, too. The two of us talked this week about Buttigiegs political future, whether Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow could jump into politics, and the ingredients of a good political candidate. It is 5:15 on a Monday evening. Wren: Youre a very competitive person. Smith plotted the rollout of Pete Buttigiegs longshot presidential campaign. As voters look for someone who can beat Trump, the fact that the press corps appears to vouch for this curious character, a young liberal red-state mayor, means that voters can give him a second look too. Yeah, I guess Id fallen in love with slightly problematic guy It wasnt like I was dating Ted BundyEliot was the former governor and attorney general of New York State, Smith said, referring to the serial killer. Maybe theres still time for me to choose a new life path because I felt extremely disillusioned. And so much of my book is about the power of belief and the element of belief that it takes to succeed in professional football, in politics, and hes the one who brought that belief back for me, and brought my love my pure love of politics back for me. He was an incredible leader at Louisiana State University someone that team could rally around, and such a maturity to him. I cant believe you didnt know that! Wren: Did you have a good handle before the campaign on Petes vulnerabilities? Oversaturation? Lis Smith (born October 15, 1982) is an American political strategist affiliated with the Democratic Party. He laid out his case for how a millennial municipal official from a town the size of a New York City Council district could somehow seize the Democratic nomination. The White House Correspondents Dinner is shrinking back to the boring awards ceremony journalists claimed to prefer. Okay, so Im working for tabloid target #1 in Bill de Blasio. Rather than going after Pete, Harris trained her fire on Biden.. | James Devaney/GC Images. They have grown to like and trust each other. Oh really, you didnt know that? As a thirty-something mayor of a medium-size city, Buttigieg faced a credibility threshold with the national press. Chuck Kennedy/PFA. And its going to be really important to have a woman sort of leading the charge on these issues, who is able to really empathize with the despair a lot of women are feeling. ", Before they get in the car, I ask Buttigieg if Smith is being helpful in his campaign. You deploy the F-bomb like Picasso used drypoint. I thought everybody knew that.. I think Ive heard Pete use the F-word once or twice, for example, and his personal life doesnt play out in the pages of the New York tabloids. Politics is really personal to me. You can unsubscribe at any time and you can contact us here. He weighed in after the Supreme Court decision. A few weeks ago, a couple of hundred people expressed interest in this event. [The vice presidency] is probably the toughest, most thankless job in Washington D.C. This is how we stop there from being a day three. I have talked to all the guys who see in the shots. This story has been shared 102,835 times. There is nothing too big for her. Youve got this hard-nosed New York-style political operative and this friendly Hoosier mayor, he said. When I stood up and left the table, Buttigieg stayed, and I recognized a woman sitting at the bar. She has also directed communications and strategy for a number of other gubernatorial, mayoral and congressional campaigns. I tell her that I have been calling around to former coworkers and associates, trying to get a sense of how she operates. Martin OMalley, who shed worked for, performing poorly in the Iowa caucuses. It is, she says, the only newspaper she subscribes to. [9] Smith was credited with implementing a campaign strategy that emphasized one-on-one interactions between Buttigieg and the press which helped raise his profile from the mayor of the fourth-largest Indiana city to a top-tier presidential candidate. The thing with Terry McAuliffe is that hes in on the joke. Eliot Spitzer. But to me it was more just revealing [the] nature of the sliding doors of campaigns, and I think thats what youre getting at. Lis Smith on Pete Buttigieg's campaign bus during a four day tour of Iowa, September 23, 2019. I think that she gets a lot of unfair criticism. My advice is just go out there more, communicate more. These days, Smith seems to be heavily involved in promoting her new book. I could bring out a little bit more of a killer instinct [in] him, but he could bring out sort of a gentler, more thoughtful side of me that was mutually beneficial to the campaign. 20172020 Pete Buttigieg presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg's 2020 presidential campaign, Martin O'Malley 2016 presidential campaign, Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, "On the Ground With Lis Smith, the Political Pro Who Invented 'Mayor Pete', "A Tabloid Bashing, and a Lost Job With the Mayor", "Virginia Politics Blog - McAuliffe Adds Press Secretary", "To Know Mayor Pete, Look at His Top Adviser's Underreported Past", "Mayor Pete Buttigieg Is Even Worse Than He Seems", "Knowing the Buttiverse: We're tracking 101 ex-staffers from Secretary Pete's 2020 campaign and where they are now", "The Women Running Presidential Campaigns Give Us a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Life on the Trail", "10 of the most powerful women who are running the 2020 presidential campaigns from behind the scenes", "Lis Smith | 2020 40 under 40 in Government and Politics", "GU Politics announces fall fellows to celebrate its fifth anniversary", "Andrew Cuomo's Smear Team: His Brother and Top Advisers, Transcripts Reveal", "The Moment Cuomo Adviser Lis Smith Says MSNBC Anchor Katy Tur Repeated Her 'Spin' On Air", "In crisis PR mode, Lis Smith told top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa to 'just have your fucking assistant text people' and 'this is insane' as sexual harassment scandal blew up", "The Michigan Democrat Who Could Solve Her Party's Identity Crisis", "Lis Smith dishes on love of political combat in new book", "Two New Memoirs Detail the Threats to American Democracy", "Confessions of a Political Swashbuckler", "Welcome to the new era of political memoir", "Any Given Tuesday: Lis Smith on Cuomo, Spitzer and a political life", "Opinion | Lis Smith's self-serving story about Andrew Cuomo", "Let's Hear From the Women Lis Smith Smeared", "Opinion | 'The G.O.P. 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