Bengal Cat Jump Height
Lis Smith is recording this call. 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. Terry McAuliffe, and President Barack Obama, Lis Smith is finally flacking for Lis Smith. Ahead of the release of her highly anticipated political memoir (which Politico Magazine excerpted last week), that includes figuring out how to get her computer to record our phone interview ammo to use in the event that it’s needed to set the record straight.
Smith, the famously aggressive political operative battle-honed in the brass knuckles politics of New York City and in red-state political tilts, plotted the rollout of Buttigieg’s longshot presidential campaign. Now she has carefully orchestrated her own book’s launch doling out choice anecdotes to her beloved New York tabloids: “De Blasio didn’t 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. Even TMZ got in the act “LEO DICAPRIO OFFERED BUTTIGIEG HELP DURING 2020 RUN,” trumpeted the chyron. She texts the buzziest bits to her sprawling network of journalistic contacts, who tweet them facts about bengal cats
Facts About Bengal Cats
go back and forth on random trivia, and pulling up things on Google. Usually, it was all good-natured. Fantasy football we were competitive about that. We were on the bus in New Hampshire the week we were playing each other and furiously checking our lineups.
Wren: You’re often credited with vaulting Pete from the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city to a member of Biden’s cabinet. How much of his success was because of you, and how much was because of him?
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 am humbled and flattered and appreciative of when people recognize the hard work I put in on our media strategy, and the fact that we employed a media strategy that was radically different from everyone else in the field.
There was only one path for us to break through. And that was our media strategy. It was a slim path. I would give Pete 95 percent of the credit and give me five percent of the credit. You couldn’t have pulled off that strategy with a Bill de Blasio. The more people bengal cat
Bengal Cat
professional football, in politics, and he’s the one who brought that belief back for me, and brought my love my pure love of politics back for me. And it’s something that forever I’ll be thankful to him for.
Wren: You mentioned that some people might view you as radioactive. 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. What is this new phase of your career about?
Smith: Democrats love to bitch that we don’t have a bench. And you know what their problem is? They’re just not looking in the right places. The Democratic bench isn’t going to be found on “Meet the Press” every Sunday, and it’s not going to be found on cable news. Oftentimes it’s not going to be found in Washington, D.C.
Seeing how Pete cuts through with people and what a truly effective messenger he’s become for the Democratic Party, it makes you realize: There’s not just one Mayor Pete. There are probably dozens of Mayor Petes out there across the country. We’re just not looking for.
Bengal Cat Jump Height
stop there from being a day three. The problem with a lot of people, not just candidates, but anyone in life who is caught up in a crisis is that they react. They lead with emotion. They feel like if they don’t respond within two minutes, that the crisis is going to fester. A better response that is informed by all the facts is the most effective way to respond.
I had to deal with candidates who, unfortunately, did not give me all the facts, and you can’t effectively handle a crisis. Honesty is really, really important to handling a crisis because you have to have all the facts at your disposal.
Wren: Did you have a good handle before the campaign on Pete’s vulnerabilities?
Smith: Are we talking about the same Pete Buttigieg? That maybe once he double-dipped his fry at Barnaby’s? Let’s be real, Adam. We knew the McKinsey stuff would be it, but he was bound by an NDA. And I talked about that in the book. But until they released him from the NDA, we just didn’t get his clients. What else was the oppo they were dropping? He wrote a paper praising Bernie Sanders.
Bengal Cat Jump Height
8 million views. There’s just no one who can do a TV interview like Pete Buttigieg.
Wren: You’ve worked in a lot of red states South Dakota, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio. Based on that experience, how should Democrats make gains in those kinds of states in 2022?
Smith: You’ve got to meet voters where they are. The most important thing is there’s no one way to be a Democrat no matter what any of these lefty groups in Washington say, and we cannot expect candidates in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Ohio and Arizona and North Carolina to check off every box on the progressive party purity test. If we do that it is a recipe for disaster.
Wren: One of your legacies is the “coaching tree,” to use an apt football metaphor, that you left behind on the Pete campaign. Alums [of the campaign] are on the Hill. They’re in the agencies. They’re out in country working on campaigns. Some are even in the White House, like Deputy Press Secretary Chris Meagher, who briefed the press not too long ago. What’s that like?
Smith: Don’t make me praise Chris Meagher. I’m joking. Not to be cheesy, but it is one.
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