Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
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Nobody is more fun than Lis Smith. A tough, energetic political agent who, in her own words, loves “a not-so-good trench warfare” and “rolling on the mud”, she became famous for the fact that Mayor Pete was half credible as a presidential candidate. He has a sharp answer to everything and an irritating nervousness.
And yet… is she really crying when I ask her to work for Governor Cuomo during his auto-da-fe last year?
“It’s hard for me to talk about it,” she said, gritting her teeth and a bottle of Bud Light last Friday night at the Barrow’s Pub, a bar near her West Village apartment. We were there to discuss Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, her new book released on Tuesday, July 19, which ends her time as she tries to advise Cuomo on communication. Not that he was listening. She knew the work was “a famous exercise in masochism” and claims that Cuomo played it. “He’s someone I cared for, loved, trusted, saw him as a mentor, a father figure, and it breaks my heart,” she said, trembling her lower lip.
After the first blush of accusations against Cuomo, she stayed around because he had sworn that he was just “stupid” and that nothing else would appear. The ground kept shifting as more and more women came forward. As Smith writes, “America’s governor was quickly turning into an American asshole.” The possible report of the prosecutor general about his nasty behavior was a coup d’état.
Smith said it hurts to think of “the collateral damage of his actions, of all the people who lost their jobs and ruined their reputation.” Honestly, I’m not one of them. But I noticed that some of that mud was splashing back on her. Texts between Cuomo’s advisers, which were published as part of the Attorney General’s report, showed Smith bragging about how she worked on the reporters. (In other words: she was caught doing her job.) Read one entry: “I am writing to Katy tur. Katy says my spin is live. Like literally on CNN. ” Tur, who actually works for MSNBC, was furious about it. “It was completely taken out of context and was completely unfair to her,” protested Smith. “She talked to the Cuomo springs, and I was the Cuomo source. She has done nothing wrong. She was doing something that people do every day of the week. It’s her job. I’m not okay with it”.
But Smith also had a piquant anecdote to tell: “In the past week or two of Cuomo’s governors, when Cuomo had lied and challenged all his advisers whether he should quit or not, Chris Christie confided to one of his advisers that he would personally get into his car. and traveled to Albany to persuade Andrew to resign. (Two former governments are as tight as the traffic on GWB.)
Smith, 39, has advised in races for the Governor’s Residence (Terry McAuliffe; Jon Corzine), the Senate (Claire McCaskill) and the White House (Barack Obama; Pete Buttigieg). She grew up in Bronxville, on the outskirts of the city, the daughter of two lawyers deeply involved in politics. She was inspired by The War Room, a documentary about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign focusing on his strategists James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. “For me, that’s why I wanted to get involved,” she said, “but let’s be real, it’s a very masculine film.” It didn’t scare her too much. Smith is comfortable in his own skin, drinks, smokes, swears and – when necessary – intimidates, all behind the Gucci sunglasses he often wears inside for the same reason Annie Wintour is talked about: so that no one will could see who she is looking at.
With Pete Buttigieg in April 2019.
Photo: Craig F. Walker / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Smith writes that the presidential campaign is “unpredictable. It’s not like keeping track of your menstrual cycle and knowing the window you will be most fertile or the day you need to carry tampons in your purse. ” (I bet Karl Rove never thought of it that way.) Male political agents, she said, “are deified for being swashbuckling, swearing and drinking, and women are expected to be like school.” . Sitting there in her black T-shirt and short denim shorts, standing in line for Johnny Cash and Guns N ‘Roses on the jukebox, Smith looked as far away from the school mary as possible. It’s fun – something that is sorely lacking in the Democratic Party today.
She learned the strategic importance of play from McAuliffe. “Republican leaders said the fact that he was adamant that he always invited them for a beer made it easier for them to work with him,” she said. “We are sometimes seen as a school watcher’s party, but we don’t have to be that way, and there are a lot of people at our party who aren’t that way. I would say Joe Biden in particular is not like that.
Maybe so, but Biden is not convincing many Americans at the moment. And he cut himself off from the press. “Biden is not the smartest, brightest speaker around, but he never was,” she said. “It has always been his charm as a colleague of Obama. I worked as the Rapid Response Director of the 2012 campaign and there was a yin-yang dynamic. It can be frustrating at times because in my job I always had to clean up when he said “Good morning Pennsylvania” when he was in Ohio or when he was talking about Governor Tom Kain when he meant Tim. Kaine, but that’s part of his usual charm. Most people don’t speak perfectly aligned sentences. She said Biden should go out and “talk to people every day, let them know you feel their pain, are on top, listen to them and care less about what the Washington media say about your style and whether you won the day,” or not. Maybe she should go to work at the White House. Somniferous Biden could use a double shot, and yet there are job vacancies.
Her passion for politics is clear and at times, at least according to her book, it can blur in her feelings for politicians as well. When John Edwards first lost in 2004, she wrote of “crying uncontrollably.” Edwards was my first political love. When his campaign ended, it hurt as much as my first breakup. ” In Dartmouth, she dated her professor, Jeff Smith, and then moved to Missouri when he ran for the state senate. “I’ve always been a crazy little boy,” writes Smith. After Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor, went bankrupt in a prostitution scandal, he ran for the post of city inspector in a weed return attempt in 2013, and hired Smith. She fell heavily, writing, “I died the moment I agreed to consult for him.”
Their relationship became a tabloid dynamite. The New York Post traced her apartment, her parents’ home, and tracked the couple to Jamaica. It is clear that the analysis has taken its toll. He writes about the development of insomnia, paranoia, reaching for the Klonopin prescription and losing self-confidence for a while. After spending years shaping the press for others, seeing yourself flit through the cover of your bookmarks was like looking in the mirror of an amusement park. “Every scandal needs its archetypal characters, and the role in which I was cast was that of a cunning whore,” she writes. Especially acute was the torment of explaining all this to his family: “Trust me – no dad or brother ever wants to hear the words” I’m in love with Eliot Spitzer. “
De Blasio, of whom she was the main spokeswoman when she ran for mayor in 2013, fired her after information about her relationship with Spitzer became public. And she didn’t forgive him. She writes about the mounting panic she felt when she first spoke to de Blasio, realizing that “the likely incoming New York City mayor was childish, intellectually lazy, overconfident in his abilities, and irritatingly condescending.” He describes him as he spits out pseudointellectualism while sipping chianti, and his teeth are stained purple. “I basically passed out for the next ten minutes while he was talking about everything from Fiorello La Guardia to Buddhism,” he writes, comparing him to “the gross non-shattering college guy who showed up on Philosophy 101 and devoted ten minutes to class. . shout about the necessity to take over the means of production ”. Smith writes how “insincere” her dismissal was, considering that de Blasio’s top aide – the future head of the New York City Investigation Department – repeatedly e-mailed Spitzer pleading for support, writing in one e-mail that “Bill and we were both wondering if you would be open to involvement.
“I understand why de Blasio was pissed off,” writes Smith. “We both tried to go to bed with Eliot, but only one succeeded.”
None of this fits in with what most politicians, and even their agents, say these days. But again, she’s not a school. Post Me Too, workplace entanglement is prohibited. But she only has so much patience for that. “My parents met at the workplace when my dad had power over my mom,” Smith shrugged. “I was dating my college professor. I dated the candidate I consulted. In my case, I didn’t feel there was any power dynamics, but I fully understand that other circumstances may be different.
“Mr. Brightside ”started playing at the bar. “I wanted it to be the anthem of Pete’s campaign,” she said, “but our lawyer said it had the subtext of” Me Too. ” We went with ‘Great Hopes’.
He believes Ron DeSantis could be a formidable contender for 2024. “To be successful in the Republican Party,” she said, “it’s not about ideological purity. Sometimes it’s more about how much you hate the people the Republican base hates. Christie understood that, he hated public employees as much as he hated the Republican base. Trump hated immigrants as much or more than the Republican base. In the case of DeSantis, they are experts, and he hired experts in education, experts in the field of medicine. It ties in with a real working-class lineage and Ivy League lineage, and I think he came up with the right style and the right Republican erogenous zones to hit everything he does.
It seems the Democrat backbench does not exist. “We need to look beyond Washington because voters can sense Washington in politicians,” Smith said. “I think the future can be found many times in states and cities.” He helps a Democrat from Michigan Mallory McMorrow. He also cites Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, Colin Allred of Texas and Ritchie Torres of the Bronx as stars.
