With Any Given Tuesday, Lis Smith delivers 300 pages of smack, snark and vulnerability. With her hand a veteran of the Democratic campaign, she shares close-ups of those who appear in the news and plates autobiographical vignettes. The book, her first, is a political memoir and a coming of age tale. It’s breezy and informative.
For twenty years, Smith worked in the trenches. She has seen a lot and bears the resulting scars. Most recently, she was a senior media adviser to Pete Buttigieg, now secretary of transportation in the Biden administration, and advised Andrew Cuomo, now the disgraced former governor of New York.
According to Smith, Buttigieg made politics ennobling and enjoyable. More importantly, he offered a way to redemption.
“He saw me for who I really was and, for the first time in my adult life, I did too,” Smith writes. According to exit polls in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Buttigieg made sense to middle-aged white college graduates. These days, he is considered by Democrats as a possible alternative to Joe Biden in 2024.
Smith goes with Eliot Spitzer, another governor of New York who has fallen from grace.
“We were like a lit match and dynamite,” she writes. Smith also raves about Spitzer’s “deep set, cerulean blue eyes,” the “most beautiful” such pair she’s ever seen. Distaq at the age of 24 provided additional fuel but Spitzer, once known as the Sheriff of Wall Street, spent less than 15 months in office. His administration ended abruptly in 2009, over his dalliances with prostitutes.
Smith can be blunt and brutal. She skewered Cuomo and flattened Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, like a pancake.
Smith details Cuomo’s mishandling of Covid, sexual harassment allegations and his disruption. He “died as he lived”, she writes, damningly, “with zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions have on them”.
As for De Blasio: “This kid couldn’t handle 9/11.” He also came up short, he told us, in the personal hygiene department: “Gross unshowered guy”. De Blasio withdrew a job offer to Smith, after her relationship with Spitzer became tabloid fodder. He also wanted an endorsement from Spitzer that never materialized.
“Both of us had tried to get into bed with Eliot but only one of us had succeeded,” boasts Smith.
On Tuesday, De Blasio dropped out of a congressional primary after getting a bare 3% support in recent polls.
Smith is very much a New Yorker. She grew up in a leafy suburb of Westchester, north of the city. Her parents were loving and politically aware. Her father ran a leading white shoe law firm. He introduced his daughter to football and the star-crossed New York Jets.
Smith went to Dartmouth. Unsurprisingly, her politics are establishment liberal. He worked on campaigns for Jon Corzine, for governor of New Jersey; Terry McAuliffe, for governor of Virginia; and Claire McCaskill, for senator in Missouri. In 2012 she got credit from Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
Smith has kind words for McAuliffe and McCaskill but portrays Corzine, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive, as aloof, never warming to the reality that elections are about retail politics and – people. However, Smith omits to mention the market-moving failure of MF Global, a Corzine-led commodities brokerage that left a wake of ruin.
“I just don’t know where the money is, or why the accounts haven’t been reconciled to date,” Corzine testified before a congressional committee. “I don’t know which accounts are not reconciled or whether the unreconciled accounts were or were not subject to the segregation rules.”
Corzine has an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Smith is candid about the corrosive effects of the Democrats’ left.
“If someone doesn’t support every policy on their progressive wish list … they’re labeled as an enemy or a hidden Republican. If these ideological purists think a West Virginia Democrat is wrong, wait until they get a load of the Republican alternative.”
But Smith also falls victim to ideological myopia. Discussing the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and its considerable political consequences, she seems to blame only the Ferguson police for the death of the young African American, who she says was “shot to death in broad daylight”. Like Hillary Clinton, Smith neglects to mention that the police fired after Brown reached for an officer’s gun. She also doesn’t mention that Brown had a fight with a convenience store owner before his run in with the law.
Inadvertently, Smith highlights the volatility of the multicultural coalition of top and bottom Democrats. Worshiping at the twin altars of identity politics and political correctness demands a high price in votes and can leave a negative impact on human life. See New York City’s current crime wave for proof.
Smith reserves some of her most powerful light for Roger Stone, convicted and then pardoned confidant of Donald Trump, pen pals of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. She calls him a “stone cold sociopath”. But she skates over animus that existed between Stone and Spitzer, her ex. In 2007, Stone allegedly left a threatening phone message for Spitzer’s father, a real estate mogul. Months later, Stone told the FBI Spitzer “used the service of high-priced phone girls” while living in Florida.
In the end, Smith is an idealist.
“I believe in the power of politics to improve people’s lives,” she writes. “I still believe there is hope for the future.”
Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story is published in the United States by Harper
