How political pro Lis Smith changed the game with the invention of “Mayor Pete,” by ClareMalone
Smith and Buttigieg on the campaign bus on November 9, 2019, headed to an event at Lebanon Middle School in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Photo: Rob Strong A couple of months back, I was in New Hampshire, bumping along on a tricked-out campaign bus stocked with SkinnyPop and White Claw hard seltzer , when Lis Smith, Pete Buttigieg’s senior communications adviser, told me something that caught me off guard. She loves the New York Post, she said, and gets it delivered to her home.
On the New Hampshire bus trip, modeled after John McCain’s Straight Talk Express , she hovered near Buttigieg at all times, glowering over her phone listening to questions as she scrolled. Smith’s theory of media domination means putting the candidate in the direct line of the press and hoping the access — rare in national politics — generates goodwill. The countless hours spent answering questions has proved a clever way to burnish Buttigieg’s smart-young-man image.
Her parents, both lawyers, had their own connections to Washington politics. Smith’s father, Thomas, is a cousin of Senator Sam Ervin, who famously ran the Watergate hearings; her mother Adrienne’s family was entrenched in the New Hampshire “first in the nation” primary process, meeting the candidates, like Reagan and Ted Kennedy, on their whistle-stop tours.
But Smith’s real power is that reporters actually like her. It helps that she’s fun — “She’ll have a beer or a vodka or several,” Vardon said — but it’s also that she knows how to spot and place a story that will pop. Vardon, who now writes about the NBA at the sports site the Athletic, put together that Buttigieg looks a little like Brad Stevens, the coach of the Boston Celtics. He sent Smith a message on Twitter.
During the Buttigieg campaign, she’s drawn fire for her record of having worked for conservative Democrats as well as progressive ones; she lacks a core belief system, her critics might say. Smith isn’t bothered. “I’m a true believer in terms of the Democratic Party, but I believe in a big-tent Democratic Party,” she said. “My personal views are, you know, I’m from New York. I’m a pretty liberal Democrat.
She considers herself an introvert. “Part of being an introvert is you sit back and watch people and see what makes them tick,” she said. One political reporter said she’s good at “making what must be 100 reporters feel like they’re intimately involved with this campaign and this candidate and can reach out for anything.” She responds to texts and emails, seemingly at all hours.
Early on, Smith said, she liked that Buttigieg was moving in a different direction from other Democrats, who were trying to meet the challenge of Trump with pugilism or by following a mantra of former Obama attorney general Eric Holder: “When they go low, we kick them.” Instead, Buttigieg oozed preternatural calm. The attraction may have been that Buttigieg was simply so at odds with what was already out there. Smith tried to explain it to me: “Growing up, my favorite band was Guns N’ Roses.
Jugular is a word that came up often when people talked about Smith, and she would certainly take the characterization as a compliment. “It’s important on a campaign to have spokespeople and to have people in public-facing roles who can go a little farther and be a little edgier than what the candidate is going to do,” Smith said. Like when she called Cynthia Nixon “unhinged” on Twitter during the actress’s primary challenge of Cuomo.
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