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Cuomo recruits former de Blasio campaign aide who dated Eliot Spitzer It obviously leads to a lot less accountability for politicians. God, you fucked that up. She was my girlfriend., Later, says Smith, when he was a state lawmaker, I would say to her, I am going to talk to such-and-such group, and she would tell me, This is what you should say. And I would say to her, Lis, I am not going to say that, its not my style, its not going to work. They need to understand how the political process works. Smith starts texting me, wanting to know if Id seen the celebrities in the audience, including George Takei, Kal Penn and Kate McKinnon. To Know Mayor Pete, Look at His Top Adviser's Underreported Past - Vice In that same vein, I know that there were people in the transportation secretarys inner circle that thought his taking that position wasnt the best idea. I was blindly ambitious, versus blindly loyal, and where the shiny object of being a New York City press secretary was more alluring to me that I was willing to overlook his very clear deficiencies. She orders a beer, downs it and orders another. After 20 campaigns flacking for candidates such as Transportation Secretary and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill,. I worked in states like South Dakota, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia. I would say that these days, my vetting skills are maybe a little savvier. He was out there. Wren: One of the theses of Petes campaign was that mayors are on the front lines of democracy. I had a beerhe stuck to waterand we talked about his political ambitions and the state of the Democratic Party and why Trump won. "Joe Biden has had one of the most successful first two years of any president in recent history," Smith said. Whats that like? 4. first campaign in 2006. In 2016 she was deputy campaign manager for Martin O'Malley, the Democratic governor of Maryland who ran for the White House. In recent months you have made a name for yourself by working for this new crop of candidates out in the middle of the country: Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, Aftab Pureval and others. Hes someone I ask for advice. Lis Smith is recording this call. Lis Smith is a veteran of twenty political campaigns. . I have a really close-knit group of friends who have nothing to do with politics. Theres a public Terry and a private Terry. Smith: I dont know, because I think one thing we saw was that he was pretty good about handling stuff. Id worked for former [Former Maryland Gov.] I know of one person in particular who said you were making a catastrophic career mistake working for a total nobody. She is 36, a year younger than Buttigieg, which, Thank God. From the second I met Pete, I knew that there was something special about him. Tim Miller, my friend, wrote a great book weeks ago, where he talks about the danger of getting sucked up in the game. . Smith had no mentors. Even people like Terry McAuliffe and Claire McCaskill, who both have outsized personalities. Axelrod told Buttigieg about Smith, and OMalley told Smith about this young mayor from South Bend. Hes someone who is very special to me, and I hope hes always a part of my life. Oh really, you didnt know that? Inside the Shrinking Newsroom of the Paper That Shapes the PrimariesBy Tim Alberta. She signed on as a consultant when he was laying the groundwork for a long-shot campaign to become the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In real life, I have a really close-knit family. Wren: You and Pete have very different brands. Lis Smith - Ballotpedia She had served as a senior aide on OMalleys 2016 bid and with the Maryland governor when he was head of the Democratic Governors Association. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. The Democratic bench isnt going to be found on Meet the Press every Sunday, and its not going to be found on cable news. You never get in a fight with someone whos trying to promote a book. They are doing things that are more directly relevant to peoples lives. Let Pete be Pete. Smith previously worked on campaigns for former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D. Shortest-ever serving Prime Minister Liz Truss is locked in a row over missing dressing gowns from a country estate where she planned her tilt at Number 10. 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. While known most recently for her ingenuity behind Pete Buttigieg's democratic presidential campaign, Smith was also a key player in Senator John Edward's (D) presidential run. What the decline of local media means is that the way that voters will get their information about candidates will come increasingly from paid media, from mail pieces and TV ads, and we all know that is not where you get the full truth. Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images. Now she has carefully orchestrated her own books launch doling out choice anecdotes to her beloved New York tabloids: De Blasio didnt trust NYPD security to keep secrets, ex-aide Lis Smith claims, blared one headline, which elicited an on the record statement from De Blasio himself. Lis Smith is a Democratic campaign communications specialist and co-founder of 50 State Communications in New York. She is the most competitive person I have ever known.. And so my advice would just be, get out there more, especially with Kamala, go out there more. [2] He suspended his campaign on March 1, 2020. Martin OMalley, who got like 1 percent in the Iowa Caucuses. Also how many, like, mind-games campaigns are playing with others. How hard-chargingNew Yorkoperative Lis Smith helpedturn an obscure Indianamayorinto a national name. For example, you write in your book about going to a pop-up bar in South Bend with Pete and his best friend and campaign manager, Mike Schmuhl. Wren: Fair enough. Lis Smith was just a college student when she worked on her first political campaign. [10] O'Malley announced his presidential run on May 30, 2015. Weve seen a lot of cataclysmic things happen. Spitzer and Smith stayed together for more than two years, with the tabloids following them pretty much the whole time. [5] For a larger list of national campaign staff, visit Democracy in Action. I, in those races, became extremely battle-tested. Traveling Press Secretary at Lunsford-Stumbo 2007 from February 2007 to . "What that looks like is going to a county that may be 80-20 . UChicago Institute of Politics (IOP) Click here. 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. And why that matters is because the states are where a lot of the key fights are going to play out following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. The book gives an unvarnished behind-the-scenes look at campaign strategy and press relations. Lis Smith Says the Path to Trouncing Ron DeSantis Is Straight Through It will codify Roe v. Wade. You have to know the social media ecosystem, how people are sharing and consuming their news. Chuck Kennedy/PFA. At 37, Smith is already a campaign-worn strategist and Washington, D.C., folk hero, credited with launching the 38-year-old mayor to, if not the top tier of the presidential race, its second. It took THREE journalists to come up with this throwaway article: Lis Smith, senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg's 2020 presidential campaign: ".I think it's probably something we have no idea about." https://politi.co/427TvyH via @politico. They lead with emotion. 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. She has a 3-day-old copy of the New York Post in her bag. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. You deploy the F-bomb like Picasso used drypoint. 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. I'm not saying that it affects him negatively, but it's an interesting question. 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. Its sad, but our politics isnt built to deal with people who are reasonable. She was the deputy campaign director for Martin O'Malley's 2016 presidential campaign. Here are links to the candidates' staff pages: Campaign staff plays an important role in the presidential primaries. [12], O'Malley suspended his presidential campaign on February 1, 2016.[13]. Smith went to Dartmouth. The White House Correspondents Dinner is shrinking back to the boring awards ceremony journalists claimed to prefer. Liz Truss is contesting a 12,000 bill for costs incurred relating to her use of the grace-and-favour Chevening estate she had access to as foreign secretary, the Mail on Sunday reported. We should start thinking about what prominent national Democrats we can use to help raise money and help campaign for them to do things like flip the Michigan state Senate. Lis Smith - Fellow - Georgetown University's Institute of - LinkedIn Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Adam Wren is national politics correspondent at POLITICO. But he is also the kind of person journalists tend to like: bookish, somehow earnest with a sense of irony, and willing to talk the way journalists like people to talk, playing the pundit and getting into the political process and discussing his own ambitions. When Smith opens her laptop, there are saved tabs about Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, a YouTube video of a facial massage routine, kale recipes, a Time Out City Guide to Dubai and a 2012 Huffington Post article about how the Obama and Romney campaigns used Twitter. In 2012 Lis directed President Barack Obama's rapid-response team for his re-election effort. Show this thread. As a thirty-something mayor of a medium-size city, Buttigieg faced a credibility threshold with the national press. [8] On the de Blasio campaign, Smith worked with campaign manager Bill Hyers, the campaign manager for Martin O'Malley's 2016 presidential campaign. If you read through the many, many profiles written of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg in the past several months, its hard not to notice just how many reporters happen to have had personal encounters with the candidate, often months before he was in the headlines. Smith plotted the rollout of Pete Buttigiegs longshot presidential campaign. It was younger reporters, super-hungry reporters that really know how to use Twitter, people who can then go to a cocktail party and tell their friends they had a beer with this guy Pete Buttigieg three hours from now. It is my passion. I worked in politics nine years before I ever moved to New York. Its really hard to do a hit piece on a guy who you are going to see the next morning over coffee and donuts, says Weaver. The New York tabs may have sharpened her game, but people who've known her for years say Smith came ready for the fight. Her new book, "Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story," goes behind the scenes of her time with some of the nation's most powerful Democratic lawmakers, sometimes in the midst of spiraling crises. Smith: One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was because when I was thinking at 19 or 20 about getting into this world, [a book like this] didnt exist. Lis Smith is recording this call. [11] Smith, who worked as a spokesperson for the PAC since her hire in 2013, then transitioned to the role of deputy campaign manager. The makeup of a candidate's staff can signal the strength of their support from influential party activists and whether they are aligning with a particular faction or group within the party. And when he was asked about that, he gave a really strong answer, and he took responsibility for things he did do in South Bend or things he didnt do in South Bend. [4], According to the Washington Post, Lis Smith began working with Martin O'Malley in 2011 during "the first part of his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. Youve got this hard-nosed New York-style political operative and this friendly Hoosier mayor, he said. Communications Director at Strickland for Governor from January 2010 to November 2010 (11 months) in Columbus, Ohio Area. The speed with which Buttegieg emerged has been astonishing, which happens to be the speed at which Smith works. Smith: All the good candidates are comfortable in their own skin.