Voiceover:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Recently we welcomed Getty Images to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GETY, as one of the newest members of our community of 2,400 listed companies. But Getty Images isn't like a lot of companies that you might see listed here. Their assets are 477 million images, film, and video going back decades refreshed every year through their Pulitzer Prize winning photographers who cover about 160,000 news, sports, and entertainment events. The content, if you want to use that word, that fills TV shows, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, blogs, Substack posts and so much corporate content that it's really impossible to fathom.
A photographer takes aim at a subject in public, shoots, and instantly it's what's known as intellectual property, an image that can be copyrighted, cataloged and sold, in the case of Getty Images, through amazing technology that it's subscription based and mostly recurring revenue. That got me to think about my own past. I was in the business of politics and government, setting up major national and global events for the president of the United States that were instantly fodder for the photographer with a camera and a lens.
In the past presidential campaign, for example, that meant that anywhere Donald Trump or Democrats like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg went or anything they did was open press or covered by a pool of photographers instantly becoming a sellable piece of property, whether the moment was flattering or not for the candidate or office holder. At heart, it was and is a symbiotic relationship. The candidate wants to be covered, wants to be seen preferably in the most flattering light. Magic hour, that time with the golden sun in the afternoon always works best. On the flip side, photographers want images that move, that get sold and get used at the top folds in New York Times.
That's when the cash register rings. The truth is maybe with the exception of Trump, neither the candidate, nor the photojournalist really want to cop to the codependence of the process. As the midterm elections heat up, we're going to be talking about the relationship between candidates and the press and the people in the middle, the spokespeople, communications directors, and press secretaries who most directly facilitate that symbiotic relationship and aren't afraid to talk about it.
Coming up on this episode, our conversation with Lis Smith, who's been in the hot seat in 20 campaigns for politicians like Barack Obama, Missouri's Senator Claire McCaskill, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and the aforementioned Mr. Buttigieg, and now the author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story out now from Harper.
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Josh King:
You might not know Lis Smith, but you've seen her work, when a little known former mayor of South Bend, Indiana went from a corner of the Hoosier state to national political prominence in 2019 and 2020, with Pete Buttigieg eventually becoming our Secretary of Transportation. He had the expert media guidance of Lis Smith to thank. As I mentioned earlier, a veteran of 20 campaigns, and now the author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, out now from Harper. Please to welcome you Lis, Inside the ICE House.
Lis Smith:
Thank you for having me, Josh.
Josh King:
Your first trip to the New York Stock Exchange?
Lis Smith:
It's interesting. During COVID, when everything was shut down, I would run down here oftentimes and walk around. It's a beautiful place to walk around, but I've never been inside before.
Josh King:
Beautiful building. Our library, our place where we do all these podcasts. But during those COVID years, really almost a ghost town outside.
Lis Smith:
It was. And that's why it was so cool to come down here because you always think of it as a super bustling place, and now you see all the security and all the people around and tourists. But in the summer of 2020, spring of 2020 when everything was really shut down, it was sort of eerie to be down here. It's great now to be here and see so much more life.
Josh King:
Congratulations so much in the book and the bestseller status. Did you ever think you'd be authoring like this?
Lis Smith:
No. I've had a lot of ambitions in life, but I've always tried to be realistic in my ambitions. I don't know. I never really pictured myself writing a book. But once I did, I wanted to do it right. I'm really, really thrilled, heartened that it made The New York Times bestseller list. When I got the news, I'm absolutely lost my mind.
Josh King:
Think back about what I said as I was talking about in the introduction, what did they see through the lens when they framed Pete Buttigieg in it?
Lis Smith:
You and I both know that image making is pretty important in politics. The image that we built for Pete was one that was authentic to who he was, but it made for good TV. It made for a good photo. You saw this 37 year old mayor going around in shirt sleeves, blue tie, a uniform that made him instantly recognizable. The image of Pete, the way that he looked underscored the greater message that he's a can do guy. He is a mayor. He is someone who'll roll up his sleeves, get to work for you, and will address issues in a different way from your typical Washington politician.
The press really did sort of take a liking to Pete, because he offered them an interesting visual. He also offered them interesting copy. He was someone who said interesting things, that aren't necessarily the usual things you hear politicians say and oftentimes not the usual things you hear Democratic politicians say. It was helpful that he was, I think, a younger candidate, because he did understand the importance of image and how he came across to people.
Josh King:
I didn't have these specific conversations with Bill Clinton, or if I did, I can't really remember him now, but he almost subconsciously knew that his visual framing was in some ways as compelling as the stories that he would tell. Did Mayor Buttigieg have a sense of being the model on the runway?
Lis Smith:
It is something that he had to learn. It's not something that necessarily comes naturally to the mayor of South Bend. That was something we definitely had to talk about a lot in debate prep is how do you look during a cutaway? Where do you hold your hands? How do you hold your face when you're listening to a question? How do you hold your face when you're opponent is attacking you? These are the things that any candidate really has to learn. But I would say that Pete did take pretty naturally to the sort of performance aspect of politics.
Again, I understand that there are people who think, "Oh, well, the performance aspect of politics shouldn't matter." But if you're giving people spinach, you got to package it with some ice cream.
Josh King:
Let's go back to the time of our lives when we couldn't wait to go get an ice cream with our parents. You must have been about eight years old when you saw this movie where someone like me would be on the other side of the squawk box with James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Let's take a listen.
James Carville:
There's a simple doctrine outside of a person's love. The most sacred thing that they can give is a label. And somehow along the way, we tend to forget that. Label is a very precious thing that you have. Any time that you can combine label with love, you've made a merger.
Josh King:
Lis, you got to be relevant because we have a lot of mergers here at the New York Stock Exchange, but tell us about how the War Room hit an eight or nine year old Lis Smith.
Lis Smith:
Oh my God. Just listening to that gives me goosebumps. I rewatched the War Room again recently because I was talking about it so much in my interviews and it's interesting, I'm going on a tangent and I'll get back to it, but I never met James Carville until right before my book came out. And then, of course, I'm citing it in all these interviews, and then he and I got connected. He is just a trip. He is just the ultimate character. But for me watching that, it was seeing this whole world a politics that I never knew existed, right? I'd only seen the highly produced events that people like you put in front of my eyes and TV.
I never really understood what it was like behind the scenes and all the labor, the love, the passion that goes into the work behind the scenes. It's simultaneously the most unglamorous work, but the most glamorous work, because it's so important in politics. The work of electing a president couldn't be more higher stakes. It was the first time I'd ever seen that curtain pulled back and to see what really goes into the making of a president and the passion, the dedication of all these people, but the beautiful aspects of it and maybe some of the more unsavory aspects, the hand-to-hand combat that both James Carville and George Stephanopoulos had to engage in.
It was truly just fascinating to me. When I saw it, I think I was maybe 10 years old when it came out. I think it came out in '93.
Josh King:
'93, yeah. It was shot in '92, cut over Christmas, and came out in early '93.
Lis Smith:
"When I saw it, I was just like, "Wow! That is something I would love to do." And of course, not knowing anyone who'd ever worked in politics, but it was just such an inspiring film for me.
Josh King:
I guess seven years or so later, you'd begin to have that opportunity. It's Dartmouth College in the early 2000s. How did that experience going to college in that state, New Hampshire, transform into this wild ride on the John Edwards for president campaign? Did it start with your parents who were both lawyers?
Lis Smith:
Both of my parents were politically active, sort of on different sides of the aisle. My mom's stepfather was the longest serving town moderator in Franconia, New Hampshire. I think he was town moderator for like 28 years. One of my dad's cousins was Sam Ervin and he was the head of the Watergate Committee. They both had some politics in their blood and their family and growing up would take me to political fundraisers, would host them at our house in Brussel, New York. They had just raised me on politics. Whereas a lot of people sort of didn't really have time for it, they taught me that it was a noble profession and something that I should pay attention to.
I was their child who really, really took to the world of politics. One of the reasons, frankly, why I chose Dartmouth College over other colleges was because I knew it was first in the nation. I knew that going there would give me access to presidential politics that going to some place like Princeton wouldn't. Really having that front row seat was incredible. I was think 19 years old the first time I met a presidential candidate there, and I got to introduce people like John Edwards and I think other presidential candidates there. I was president of Young Democrats there. I started a student group for him there.
You get just this up close and personal view of presidential politics that you wouldn't get anywhere else. I ended up taking off time to travel a country for Edwards' 2004 campaign, and it was really, really cool. You know how just special these early states are and the access voters and college students. I mean, it's ridiculous. There's a whole thing in New Hampshire that voters there don't make up their minds until they've met a candidate four times. And now there's this whole push to change the early states to get rid of Iowa, get rid of New Hampshire. I just think it's such a mistake, and I understand the concerns about diversity and the lack of diversity in the states.
I understand the concerns about caucuses in general. But my God, from all the time I spent in Iowa and New Hampshire, those are states that take the responsibility of choosing president so seriously. These people make it their job to go see all these different candidates. In 2020, it was a 20 person field. But they take it really, really seriously the role of vetting candidates. After those two states, I just saw this massive drop off in the sort of seriousness of voters and how serious they took the role in vetting presidential candidates.
One of the things that I loved was not just watching democracy unfold and not just being able to be a college student who could at 19 years old meet all these presidential candidates, but to see the growth of a presidential candidate like Pete Buttigieg that could only occur when you are in these living rooms getting grilled with sometimes the most arcane of questions and having to deal with voters up close and personal and not just the usual debate that you have on cable news, that's a process that makes every candidate better.
Josh King:
When you were plying the country with Edwards in 2004, I mean, there were so many interesting parts of that campaign, both the primary period and also the general, but one of the major moments of one of those first in the nation contests was not in New Hampshire, but it was in Des Moines, Iowa. One of the major moments was this. Let's listen.
Howard Dean:
If you had told us one year ago that we are going to come in third in Iowa, we would've given anything for that. You know something? You know something? Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, DC to take back the White House.
Josh King:
What did that teach you about the media's obsession with gaffe coverage?
Lis Smith:
I actually sort of opened my book by talking about this because it was a really formative moment in my career. I wasn't working for Howard Dean.
Josh King:
Of course, the Dean scream.
Lis Smith:
The Dean scream. I got to know Howard Dean when he endorsed Pete for DNC chair in 2017. I talked with him a little bit about it, and he's had very kind words to say about my book, which I appreciate because I was honest about that moment. But it taught me that there were so many stories that you could have written out of that night. And that was a speech that Dean gave the night of the Iowa caucuses that Kerry won. Edwards had just sort of come out of nowhere and come into really close second place. You would've thought that those would be the big stories, right? Kerry had been left for dead a few months prior and everyone had sort of assumed that it was going to come down to Dean and Gephardt.
They had been polling at the top for a while, but all of the coverage in the ensuing days wasn't about Kerry's come from behind victory and Edward's surge. It was about Dean's speech and how poorly it came across on TV, that scream at the end, because it fed into this narrative that the media had of Dean that he was unhinged or that he was a weirdo, that his supporters were weirdos, his campaign was weird. It was completely unserious coverage. It had nothing to do with the race. It had nothing to do with policy, but it did show the importance of how candidates present themselves and how just one bad moment like that.
Keep in mind, and I write about this in the book and you understand this, I'd be curious for your perspective on this, is that for the press in the room, his speech did not seem weird at all and the way that he delivered it did not seem weird at all, because it was a crowd of hundreds of labor guys. We know how labor guys can get at events. They'd been waiting for hours. He was trying to meet the energy of the crowd in the room. But because he was using a unit directional microphone, what was being piped back to the cable news in New York and DC sounded very different. You didn't get all of the background noise. You got some of it.
What was piped back then sounded completely unhinged, like maybe Dean was losing it, but that wasn't reflective of the reality. You had this dynamic where you had reporters on the ground saying, "Hey, that wasn't actually what happened," but the cable news poobas in New York and DC saying, "You know what? It's a better TV narrative if we go with this."
Josh King:
I mean, I deconstructed that thing in my own book. I'll just tell a little aside now, because a very young Dean advanced man named Beau Willimon, who ended up becoming the creator and executive producer of Netflix's House of Cards and has become a very successful Hollywood writer, was assigned to that restaurant that night with Governor Dean. Maybe it wasn't him precisely, but a mistake was made, and the mistake was that one of the basic things when any performer goes to a venue is reverse monitors. That you have speakers on the stage that blow as much sound back to you as the crowd is getting so that you can exist in this neutral bubble.
That if you speak, you hear yourself accentuate your words as loud as the room is going to be. But there were no monitors on that stage. As you say, the crowd was boisterous, but Dean couldn't hear himself. He was just trying to speak over the crowd so he could hear himself. You got to have the monitors back at you to neutralize that sound and poor Dean didn't have it. He just couldn't hear himself.
Lis Smith:
It would've been tough for Dean to come back after coming in third in Iowa no matter what, but the coverage of him was unfair. It was unfair to him. It was also unfair, I think, to Kerry a bit. It was unfair to Edwards, because I think Edwards deserved more of a bump out of that. And it's unfair to voters and in the general public because it portrayed something that...
Josh King:
Was insignificant.
Lis Smith:
Right, insignificant.
Josh King:
I mean, talk about the journey from '04s to a couple years later, you got involved in the 2006 campaign between Claire McCaskill and Jim Talent in Missouri. Here's an ad that the actor Michael J. Fox shot for candidate McCaskill.
Michael J. Fox:
As you might know, I care deeply about stem cell research. In Missouri, you can let Claire McCaskill, who shares my hope for cures. Unfortunately, Senator Jim Talent opposes expanding stem cell research. Senator Talent even wanted to criminalize the science that gives us a chance for hope. They say all politics is local, but it's not always the case. What you do in Missouri matters to millions of Americans, Americans like me.
Josh King:
How did that ad trigger a political and media firestorm that eventually left you victorious and what did it teach you?
Lis Smith:
Well, and that's one of those ads where if you just hear the audio of it, you don't get the full power of it. Again, it speaks to the power of images in politics. I write in my book about how that ad came about. When Michael J. Fox came to Missouri to campaign for Claire, I sort of drew this straw staffing him. I remember sitting in a small room with him. Oftentimes when you have these high profile surrogates come to town for you, you just sort of post up in a hotel conference room and do this rotating thing of media.
I remember locking eyes with some of the media that came to interview him and everyone, myself included, was just shocked at his physical state, because it had only been a few years earlier that he had gone public with his Parkinson's diagnosis and he had largely been out of the public eye, but the symptoms of his Parkinson's were jarring. When we filmed this ad, the words I think were pretty simple, pretty powerful, but what made them extremely powerful was the visual, because you see him struggling to hold on his leg and dealing with the tremors. We knew that this ad was not your typical political ad.
Oftentimes in campaigns, you just drop these ads and you know they're going to move voters. They hit the right sort of messages that they care about. But we knew that this ad was like a gut punch. We saved it for one of the nights of the World Series when the Cardinals were playing and when we knew it was going to be just a maximal audience. It dropped and it just dropped a nuclear bomb. Immediately, we just started raising buckets of money, but immediately the national press picked it up and they were like, "Oh my God, wow! This is a really, really powerful ad."
The right-wing freaked out and our opponent, Jim Talent, the incumbent Republican senator, freaked out because one of the things he was banking on was that voters would sort of give him a pass, because they viewed him as a decent guy, not overly partisan, a good guy and who was making the right decisions for the people of Missouri. But this went at his core strength because it's like, how could someone, a good decent person, oppose the life statement cure as stem cell research, which is a fairly bipartisan thing. They just struggled with how to respond. There were so many disastrous decisions that they made.
They tried to bring in their own set of Hollywood actors to do a response ad, but even worse was it provoked this response from Rush Limbaugh a few days later on air where Rush Limbaugh, it's obviously a radio show, but it's live streamed to the web, he accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the effects of Parkinson's and mimicked them on camera. Let's just say that did not go over well. When you think of Rush Limbaugh and his reputation, this is a guy who never apologized for anything. It was a bridge too far for him. I remember right after he did, it then amplified the ad a million times over.
I think we raised a million dollars within 24 hours of Limbaugh doing that. The next day Limbaugh had to walk back and apologize. It was one of the few times I've ever seen Rush Limbaugh ever apologize for anything, but it goes to show how an ad that is so simple and so stark, it didn't have fancy graphics, but how just really simple visuals, a really simple message can really be the most powerful of all.
Josh King:
Let's consider the case of Terry McAuliffe. I've known Terry since the 1988 campaign fundraising. Lundar Kind, who put Dick Gephardt on the map, guys got a ton of charisma, but what did the 2009 Shad Planking event tell you about when too much really is too much?
Lis Smith:
For your listeners who might not be familiar with the Shad Planking event, it is one of those annual political events that every state sort of has in their politics. In Virginia, it's this thing where they grill up bony fish and people go and they give these sort of roasts of their opponents. Now, Democrats don't really attend it anymore because it was very Confederate flag heavy and I think rightfully. The Democrats realized that the optics weren't great. Terry McAuliffe actually was the first nominee for governor to not attend.
But in 2009, when he was a candidate in a Democratic primary for governor, we thought that the way to show strength was to blanket the 10 mile drive up this rural road to Shad Planking with 25,000 yard signs. In some people's heads on our campaign, it showed energy. This shows that Terry McAuliffe is going to have the resources to compete against Republicans, but it was actually the opposite. It played into one of Terry's weaknesses, which is that he was seen as this big money guy. He was this brazen, just shameless fundraiser. Yes, but someone who was sort of trying to buy the nomination. It was just a little too much. I was a little too gaudy.
I remember I was in the car with Terry and his wife, Dorothy, and his wife, Dorothy, was always sort of voice of common sense, as spouses often can be on these campaigns. When we pulled up and got out of the car, she just sort of winced and was like, "Guys, was that really necessary?" And even Terry, who was someone prone to enthusiasm and sort of doesn't mind that ostentatious side of him, realized it was too much. And that too much of a good thing can be too much and that it didn't convey strength. It was gaudie and it was too much.
Four years later, when he ran for governor again, he ran a completely different type of campaign, one that was not rooted in being showy and doing these ostentatious shows of viz, as we call it, visibility in campaigns. It was a much smarter tactic to take.
Josh King:
Before we get to the break, Lis, just a quick little diversion into social media. You write a lot about how Barack Obama used Twitter as a novelty against Mitt Romney in 2008, but began to master it in 2012. Trump, of course, took it to a new level in 2016. But what was the state of play when you first started working on it with Stephanie Cutter and how you see it affecting now the outcome this year and in 2024?
Lis Smith:
It was really different in 2012. That was the first presidential election where social media was a factor. It was mostly Twitter, if we're going to be honest, that was a factor. Twitter then was very different from Twitter now, but we understood that we could use it to really shape the news in the moment. As you know from working on plenty of presidential campaigns, traditionally, your opponent goes out, does an event. An hour or two later, you email out, fax out, whatever it is, a statement and the reporters just sort of plug it into their story and file it. What we realized with Twitter was that we could sort of shape stories in real time.
For instance, if Romney was holding an event in Ohio and was asked a question from a voter, where the voter said something about Barack Obama being a Muslim or something like that and Mitt Romney didn't condemn the comment in the moment, we could zero in on that in social media, on Twitter. Get reporters to jump all over it. Before the events even finished, an event that might be on auto jobs or something like that, the nature of how reporters are covering the event is completely different and their angle is completely different because now they're going to say, "Well, actually the news out of this is that Mitt Romney didn't condemn this horrific comment made by one of his supporters like John McCain did four years earlier."
It taught us that we could really shape the media narrative as it was happening in a way that you hadn't been able to do in previous cycles.
Josh King:
When we come back with Lis Smith, author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, we turn the page, as it were, in her new book, going from those early lessons on campaigns to the big show at the highest levels with Mayor Pete and what 2020 may teach us about 2024. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Back now with Lis Smith, author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story. The first half of the show, we were talking about cutting your teeth in American politics and runs for the senate, for the governor's mansion, for the presidency of the United States and about the curious, often contentious, but sometimes codependent relationship between candidates and those who cover them. And now we're going to get into the ultimate case study. Lis, it's June 2016.
You write that you decided to swear off politics and intimate relationships while decompressing in Uganda, for all places, but both of those ideas sort of collided with a column you read by Frank Bruni in The New York Times entitled, with a question mark, The First Gay President? Bruni's writing, of course, about the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg. You asked yourself the rhetorical question in the book, how have I not heard of this guy? I'll ask you, how had you not heard of this guy?
Lis Smith:
I am a political junkie in the truest sense of the word, and one thing I pride myself on is not just paying attention to the personalities in Washington, the senators, the congress members who are on cable news and get the lion share of attention, but always looking to the states to sort of see who are the interesting up and coming talents that aren't necessarily on Meet the Press every Sunday. I don't know, I guess I missed the Bruni column. But as soon as I started looking into Pete, I just realized, oh my god, this is someone different, someone special.
It was very, very bold of Frank Bruni to write about I think then 34 year old openly gay mayor of a town of a hundred thousand people to write a headline suggesting he could be president of the United States. But the more I got to know about Pete just from research, even before I even talked to him, the more I saw, oh my god, this guy could be the real deal like that once in a lifetime candidate that every political operative like you or me dreams of meeting and probably never gets to meet.
Josh King:
You wrote that of your first phone call with him, he checking you out, maybe you checking him out a little bit, "he asked thoughtful, granular questions about media strategy." Curious, what did he ask you and what'd you tell him?
Lis Smith:
Well, he was realistic. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with him, but this is not your average political candidate. This guy who's a Road Scholar, speaks seven languages, IQ off the charts. As a woman in politics, it's pretty important that you not get easily intimidated, but he was just next level intelligent, but he was very realistic about the path ahead of him for... This is about DNC chair, not even his presidential race, and was like, "Well, I'm the mayor of South Bend. Like why would the national media cover me? How do we get national media coverage? How do I get national media coverage in a way that doesn't cheapen me?"
Because when I was talking with him, it was December of 2016, he was just about to announce that he was running for DNC chair. Just to bring us all back to that time period, that was right after Trump had shocked everyone by winning the presidential election. Most smart prognosticators, myself included, we understood that Hillary Clinton had her flaws as a candidate, but thought that she would win. There was this idea among a lot of Democrats that we had misplayed our hand against Trump and that our strategy was all wrong. And that to beat Trump, we had to be Trump. Eric Holder had that famous quote that when they go low, we kick him them the teeth.
What Pete wanted to be sure of was that if he was going to run for a DNC chair, he knew that he would have to sort of play on the national stage, was that he did not want to go out and be someone that he wasn't. He didn't want to go out and sort of played at the lowest common denominator and adopt this hyperventilating tone where he had to call every Republican Donald Trump and every Trump supporter every name in the book and demonize everyone and yell and scream to get attention.
He wanted to make sure that he could be true to who he is, which is a thoughtful, cerebral guy, someone who has appeal across to both Democrats and Republicans, is not a hyperventilating guy and frankly doesn't present as an overly partisan guy, but still play on the national stage. He was curious, could that actually work? And did he have to pander? If he had to pander, that wasn't something he was really interested in doing.
I thought it was really fascinating that he was self-aware enough to understand that he was not really what the media was gravitating toward at the moment, but that he had sort of this savvy and, I don't know, what would you say, the self-possession to realize that if he did pander, let's say if he had decided to pander, that it would come across as inauthentic and it would undercut a lot of the things that he stood for as a public figure and as a politician. Getting into that sort of granular conversation was really fascinating, because oftentimes when I interview with politicians, they basically are just like, "Okay, well, how do I get in The New York Times? How do I get into MSNBC?"
It's not like going as many layers deep as Pete did with me and understanding the nature of news media coverage and also understanding the importance of maintaining authenticity in your personal brand.
Josh King:
If you were teaching a course at NYU and it was all off the record, but we're not, because we're talking about a podcast, give us a little clinic on developing and getting an exclu, as you say, in the book about Pete's announcing his candidacy. This is The New York Times. You have one shot with a sort of modest piece of news that this person's going to run for DNC chair, but it could be for President of the United States. Bring us behind the curtain of the operative Lis Smith, the people whose names she has in her iPhone, how it's done and what is the quid pro quo?
Lis Smith:
Well, quid pro quo makes it sound a little more nefarious than it actually is. I mean, let's be real. The exclu I talk about in here is about Pete's announcement for DNC chair. There is nothing that any media outlet covets more than getting an exclusive, getting something first, getting a scoop and being able to beat their competitors. One, that's important. Two, you got to make the story a little sexy for them, which is that when Pete was running, he was running as an outsider, a dark horse candidate, but someone with a very different type of message from the other candidates who were running and a very different type of background.
We could then make it a more interesting story for them, which was that Pete wasn't saying everyone who voted for Donald Trump is racist, white supremacist, sexist, whatever, and just running on an anti-Trump platform. He was someone who said that the Democratic Party fundamentally need to reorient how it talked with voters and especially voters in the middle of the country. That was a completely different message from what you're hearing from other Democrats running for DNC chair and other national Democrats as a whole. That's an interesting message that is sort of newsy for them. It's sort of newsy because it is a little bit critical of the Democratic Party.
There are people who are interested in him running for DNC chair who were big names, people like David Axelrod. We could also say give David Axelrod a call. He'll give you a quote. It's a combination of a few different things, right? It's the playing to the competitiveness, giving them something that they will have alone, giving them an interesting message, something that's different from what all the other Democrats are saying, and then giving them some high profile people who can go on the record. Axelrod was one. I think maybe Dean was another person.
Think about if you're giving someone a nice gift and what would make a nice gift that someone would be excited to get. And that's sort of how you approach an exclusive.
Josh King:
When you're giving that gift, Lis, are you putting it on a text or an email or you got to talk to him in person? Do you got to give him a time limit to accept the gift or not before you're moving on?
Lis Smith:
We had a hard date for when Pete was going to get in the race, and so we negotiated, okay, he's going to get in the race by January 4th. We'd like to get it out that morning. They go to their editors and the lead up to it. Sometimes these things don't work out, they pass on it, so then you go to the next outlet. You essentially do the same pitch until you find a taker for it. But yeah, you give them a deadline. Sometimes it's over the phone, sometimes it's over email, but you try to make it as easy as possible for them to do and do a lot of the legwork for them so that it incentivizes them as much as possible to write about it.
Josh King:
So then there is this pretty long political diaspora that was the period between ultimately the failed run for DNC chair in 2016 and his announcement for his candidacy for president in 2019. But curiously and interestingly during that period, Pete gets pretty darn good at stumping for candidates in red states where coastal Democrats don't often like to tread. What was his ability to connect?
Lis Smith:
There was this view of the democratic party after 2016 that we had sort of gotten way too much into a party of coastal elite. True or not, that was the perception. It had hurt us in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, all these states, Rust Belt States, that Barack Obama had won in 2012. Having someone who could then go out and be an effective messenger in these places was seen as really important, really important politically and something that was lacking in the Democratic Party. It played to Pete's natural strengths because he was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. South Bend, Indiana is a Democratic city, but it is not a Democratic city in the way that New York City is.
It is much more culturally conservative. When you land at the South Bend Airport and you get picked up to go into town or whatever, one of the first signs or billboards that you drive by is the We Vote Pro Life's billboard. It's more culturally Conservative Democrats. It's traditionally a labor town. It's very Catholic. He just day-to-day was very accustomed to speaking to Republicans, yes, but a lot of Democrats who didn't fit the mold of what you traditionally think of as Liberal Democrats.
I think that gave him a cultural fluency that helped him. When he would go up and address sometimes these crowds of a thousand people, these are Democrats who oftentimes feel overlooked by the National Party, like they don't matter, and that the National Party doesn't try to talk to them or try to understand them. They would go absolutely wild for him because they realize, one, this guy's one of us. He gets it. He understands how we talk here. But two, he doesn't look down on us and he's giving us time.
It went over really, really well, and that was when we started to see that he could make a run for this and this is sort of a niche for him. Not a lot of Democrats were doing that at that time. They were really just playing to the base of the base.
Josh King:
Talking about that experience of flying to South Bend and what you see when you come out of the airport entrance, as you're helping Buttigieg craft this campaign plan, you, this New York City girl, is spending a lot more time out in Indiana. You worked in South Dakota for Tom Daschle, Missouri for Claire McCaskill, Ohio for Ted Strickland. But how are you, now older than you were in a lot of those earlier campaigns, mellowing a bit as you spent more and more time away from the West Village?
Lis Smith:
I think having the background of working in these very red states or purple states, whatever you want to call them, was really, really helpful to me in politics because it taught me that there are many, many different ways to be a Democrat, right? Working in other places like Kentucky, West Virginia, you really see that a West Virginia Democrat is a whole different beast from a New York Democrat. That was really helpful in my background. But in the ensuing years, I had eventually gone back to work in New York politics, had worked for Bill de Blasio. I'd worked for Andrew Cuomo.
It is a very hard edged type of politics, very brass knuckles, because I mean, a lot of the communications is happening in the pages of The New York Post and The Daily News and tabloids and New York TV. It's a very, very, very different style of flacking and of communications. But then going to work for Pete, it's like night and day. I remember in 2018, I was consulting for Andrew Cuomo and his reelection campaign, also consulting for Pete as he's doing these red state things. You could not imagine a bigger study in contrast.
But what Pete did for me and what working for Pete and being on his campaign and being in South Bend sort of reminded me is that politics doesn't have to just be about punching your opponents in the face. It doesn't have to just be this race to the bottom that you oftentimes can get in these big media markets like in New York. It doesn't need to be like that. It sort of brought me back to why I'd gotten involved in politics in the first place, which is that it matters to people's lives and that what should matter most is not whether you have some barn burner of a quote in The New York Post, but whether you're going out there and delivering a message that appeals to people and whether you're appealing to people's...
I don't want to sound overly idealistic here, but doing what politicians should do, which is appealing to Americans' better angels and their decency. Pete reminded me about all of the good things about politics that sometimes had gotten lost in the mix for me during my tenure in New York City and New York state politics.
Josh King:
To people who Pete would reach out to besides yourself, they would say things like, "You got no name recognition. You got no money. You got no shot." And yet, I think part of your practice is to go back to 2016 and become a student again, watching how Hillary Clinton did it, how Donald Trump did it. And then I think if you try to weigh the pros and cons of those two, you end up sort of a big compromise by going much farther back, John McCain, 2000. What are the pros and cons of each approach and how did you ultimately tailor it to who Pete was and is?
Lis Smith:
Right. I talk about how I did look at the 2016 campaign. The Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton's campaign, had run a campaign where they had kept the press very much at arm's length. A lot of that was because for two plus decades, she'd been target of a lot of unfair media coverage. I think that had caused her team to put up a wall with the press, to be distressful of them, not think that they're going to be honest brokers, give her a fair shake and be overly tough on her in interviews. There was a lot of truth to that, and I can understand why they had that. But they would then go stretches of 200 days at a time where she wouldn't do a press conference.
You shelter her from the press. But then that means that anytime she goes out and she does an interview, or anytime her campaign does something and maybe there's a gaffe, then the press just sinks their teeth into it and they just run with it, because that's the only thing that they've been given. That's the only thing that they can run with. Trump, on the other hand, gave so much access to the media in that campaign. As president, his communication style changed a little bit and his access level changed a little bit. But in the 2016 campaign, there was this idea that Donald Trump's gaffes would sink him, right?
The fact that he is making himself so available to the media and saying so many things that politicians generally would be advised not to say. It seemed like every single day he said something that a smart political observer would say, "Okay, well, that's disqualifying. That's a campaign ender. Put a fork in it. He's done." But because he flooded the zone so much, it's like no one narrative could ever sink in about him. A lot of how you win a presidential primary is just by getting attention and blocking out the sun for your opponents. All the coverage that he was getting meant that Marco Rubio wasn't getting coverage.
Jeb Bush wasn't getting coverage. Other candidates that you would've expected to rise to the top weren't getting coverage. And that was enough for him to win the primary. I think it helped him in the general election as well. I wouldn't advise people to do necessarily what Trump did of just going out and saying provocative offensive things day after day after day. But I did learn from it. I think what I say in the book is that you either feed the beast or the beast feeds on you. He fed the beast. In Hillary Clinton's case, the beast fed on her.
Because she was not giving content to the media, because she was not giving them storylines, she was not giving them fresh soundbites or news, they then could just define her on their terms. No candidate should ever let themselves be in that position. We learned from Trump's tactics, I would say, and tried to adopt them and married them with what John McCain did in 2000 when he had the Straight Talk Express, which is just... When you talk to reporters from that cycle, their eyes light up because, one, it was the first time in modern history that someone had done that, which is an all access on the record bus tour.
It was something that generated a lot of goodwill for John McCain in the media, but allowed him to overcome a big money deficit with George W. Bush and get his name out there and earn media.
Josh King:
All of this work that you had done with Pete starting with the run for DNC chair and now really all this time in South Bend thinking about what kind of style he's going to adopt, how you're going to work with the press, even creating this uniform of the rolled up white sleeves and the blue tie, it comes down to a moment where, sort of to pick up on that Frank Bruni column, The First Gay President, and most people hadn't heard of him the way that you hadn't when you were in Uganda, but he shows up finally at a CNN Town Hall at South by Southwest in Austin. Let's just hear a quick clip.
Pete Buttigieg:
I know that it's more traditional to maybe come from congress to have a background in Washington, but I would also argue that we would be well-served if Washington started to look more like our best run cities in towns, rather than the other way around. Think about it. One thing you've never heard of is a city shutting down because they couldn't agree on a policy, right? It's literally unthinkable. We would never do it.
Josh King:
Lis, set the scene for us. I mean, a lot of work on your part to score that gig, and then to get him ready to stand on that stage.
Lis Smith:
CNN was about to take out a restraining order against me in the run up to that town hall and locking it in because I was just relentless with them. 2020 cycle was the first time that CNN had really used these town halls in the primary process. They held an early one, I think, with Kamala Harris. They'd got big ratings, and then they'd had a couple senators. I just saw it as, one, it was an important innovation. I mean, you and I both know that town halls are around in politics and residential politics, but never before had you had a town hall where you get an hour to yourself, prime time, to just basically go out and make your case. For a lot of people, that could be scary.
I know that there are some candidates who didn't want to do the town halls, because an hour of TV means that you can't just get by on a five to seven minutes of canned soundbites. You're going to have to actually answer some real questions. But I knew that the town hall format would really play to Pete's strength, because he's someone who, yes, he can be great on TV. He can do the soundbites and all that stuff. Anyone who's seen him on Fox News knows that guy is really, really good at that sort of stuff and the jousting. But he is someone who is at his best when he can really let his answers breathe and speak in paragraphs.
There's something that I saw that was really refreshing about his style because he was thoughtful, intellectual, someone who framed arguments completely different from the way that other Democrats were, but he was also someone who looked completely different, right? I talk about that in the book, and this is a big thing, was like we knew when we locked in the CNN Town Hall that if you're Kamala Harris, whether you do well or not, you're going to be fine. You raised a gazillion dollars the day you announced for president. No matter how you do, your campaign's going to live another day.
With Pete, we knew that we had to make the most out of this moment and that this was maybe the only time this moment was going to come along. We prepared for it in every sense of the word, prepared and sort of figure out, okay, let's figure out some really key messages that you need to try to hit. Let's try to figure out is there a viral moment in here that we could have that will take off and people pick up, other news outlets will pick up, and that people will run wild with. But also style wise, is there a way that you could stand out? It drove some people nuts.
But I was a big proponent of having a different sort of look for Pete, a look that was frankly very natural and authentic to him as a young mayor, which was the white shirt sleeves with the blue tie. When the town hall started, I remember getting some texts from, I'm not going to say their names, but some very big names in Democratic politics being like, "Lis, I don't want to understand what you're doing with this look. It makes them look younger, not older." First of all, they'd never seen him in a suit jacket. It was not a pretty sight. That was before we got him more tailored suits.
But they also didn't understand that being different... Just because things have always been done one way doesn't mean that they need to be done going forward. You know this from working presidential politics is that whether you're on Democratic side or Republican side, there's a very small-c conservative bias, which is that people tend to do things only the things that have worked in elections past, and they're very, very risk averse. The amount of criticism I got for this. I mean, I ultimately obviously got the last laugh because it became a very distinct look for Pete and it was something that underscored his sort of message.
It was thinking through the message, thinking through different messages that he could deliver, thinking through the need to deliver sort of a viral moment, but also how he would look different. It was a very small team at that time. I was his only communication staffer. We had a campaign manager and then we had, I think, a digital staffer and a fundraiser. I made sure that the digital team had the capability to clip video, get it online, and send out stuff to our supporters to get them to amplify it, because we had one shot here and we need to make the most out of it. We ran it was a debate war room, and this is March of 2019. None of the other campaigns that were doing these things approached it this way.
But having run Barack Obama's war room, I literally brought the sort of tactics I'd learned from there, updated for 2019, to this town hall. You never seen anything like it, because he hit the messages. He had a viral moment, and he looked so different. His style was so refreshing. Behind the scenes we did all this work to make sure that our supporters were seeing it, our donors were seeing it, the media was seeing it. He just took off rocket ship and no other candidate that cycle was able to do what he was able to do with a town hall.
I always describe the campaign as having two distinct phases like BCAD. It's like, like B CNN, and A CNN. The day after the CNN Town Hall, we woke up to an entire different world.
Josh King:
$7 million raised in just a couple days. People started voting with their wallets.
Lis Smith:
Yeah. It's so quaint to think about, but we had set a goal of raising $1 million for the quarter. I think this was about... The CNN Town Hall was I think three weeks out from the fundraising deadline. Up until that point, we had maybe raised I think $300,000, and we were thinking, "Oh my god, a million dollars, that's going to be a stretch." But then within, I think, 24, 40 hours of the town hall, we'd raised a million dollars. And then within the next few weeks, we got to $7 million. When we announced it, the National Press Club was shocked because no one was expecting that.
There was this other dynamic there, which is the DNC had put in place a threshold for candidates to make the debate stage because everyone and their mother was running for president in 2020. On the Democratic side, there were over 20 candidates. I think there were 25, 26 candidates and they wanted to limit it to only 20 candidates who could be on the debate stage. They said that to make the debate stage, candidates had to have at least 65,000 individual donors. We thought there was no way we were going to meet that. Within 24 hours of the town hall, we got those 65,000 individual donors.
The people I knew in politics, people who had run presidential campaigns, I remember calling me saying they'd never seen anything like this. They'd never seen anything like that before in politics. They couldn't believe it. They had been encouraging of me for doing this, but were pretty shocked by it. But our campaign manager, Mike Schmoll, had an interesting way of describing it, which was that like with that one town hall, Pete warped political time. It's like with that one town hall, he skipped seven of the normal steps that you take when you're running for president. That's just not something that happens every cycle.
It was something incredible to be a part of and something that goes to show that conventional wisdom be damn, you can really do incredible things. You can really shock the system if you have a can as talented as he is, if you have a scrappy team and if you are willing to take risks and not just subscribe to the old way of doing things.
Josh King:
Taking risks. As we wrap up our conversation, I want to sort of focus in on that for just a couple more minutes, which is one of the things that Pete Buttigieg gets very deserve credit for is the comfort in walking out of the green room of Fox News and onto the set with their anchors to take whatever they have to throw at him. It's not the kind of risk that a lot of people who are wearing the D card want to take. I want to hear an exchange that he had with Fox News Sunday's former anchor Chris Wallace.
Chris Wallace:
There was widespread criticism after you went back to South Bend that you showed more head than heart there. In a new Quinnipiac National Poll of African Americans, it shows that you have 0% support, zero, in the Black community. Your response?
Pete Buttigieg:
We're getting a very good response in the Black community to the policy ideas I put forward. But what you saw there and what we're dealing with at home is this wall of mistrust between law enforcement and between Black residents. It is a huge issue. It is not unique to South Bend, but we are working through the pain of that issue in South Bend right now.
Josh King:
What can Democrats and their handlers learn from Pete's comfort in the lion's den?
Lis Smith:
Elections are one by the persuadables, by the swing voters. It's like in 2020, that's how Joe Biden was able to win places like Arizona, Georgia, states that hadn't gone for Democrats in a very long time. It was not because he ran up to square with Democrats, it was because he converted a lot of Republicans. The way that you're going to communicate with a lot of these people is not by going on MSNBC or not by going on left leaning outlets. I talk with a lot of senate candidates right now and congressional candidates who are running in red areas. I'm close with Tim Ryan, for instance, who's running in Ohio and he's really smart.
He's running one of the best campaigns of any of the senate candidates out there. It's not uphill race. It's in Ohio, but he understands that to win, he needs to reach out to the Fox News audience and he's got to go out and make the case for himself there, because that is going to reach the voters who will put him over the top, not MSNBC. My general advice with Fox News is do it. Be prepared. Don't go on to pander to the Fox News host. Go on to talk about your values and share your message. Voters will reward you for showing them the respect of going on the outlet that they exclusively tune into.
For the Democratic Party as a whole, we can't expect to do better in purple states in red states, especially in a tough year like 2022, unless we go into the lion's den and try to appear the right-wing bubble. Because if we're just talking to ourselves, there is no way we are going to win any of these tough races. I really, really hope more Democrats learn from Pete's example. Pete, his favorite outlet to go on, the interviews he has the most fun doing are on Fox News because to him, it feels like the one time that he's actually ever challenged and isn't just asked leading questions. He likes it because it creates more chemistry for him and it's a little more intellectually stimulating.
Josh King:
Let's look to 2024 and borrow a Trump phrase as it relates to candidates, which is central casting. Our last two match ups were among septuagenarians. It could be again. But what do you think the alchemy is of the man or woman who really can excite voters from the other side, background, work experience, gender, age, life story, comfort talking with the other side, intellectual capacity? I think you could check all those boxes for Pete. Humor, maybe not so much. What's the perfect package?
Lis Smith:
I don't think that there's like any one way to be a successful presidential candidate. What's important is to sort of meet the moment that you're in. I'm going to challenge you a little bit. Pete actually has a pretty dark, a little wicked sense of humor, and he does have fun. He was one of the candidates in 2020 who looked like he was having fun on the campaign trail. He was out there jostling with the press and on the bus and going out there and going on Barstool Sports, TMZ Live, doing things that a lot of candidates wouldn't do and most candidates would kill their advisors if they were setting them up for interviews about Kansas City Chiefs and Kanye and Kim and all that stuff.
But Pete had a good sense of humor about it. But point taken, he can come across seriously, but we need to see what 2024, 2028 looks like. As you know, everything can change on a dime. What matters in these elections is whether candidates can really meet the moment. That's why Joe Biden was able to do well in 2020 because people were really looking for someone who was serious and someone that they could had enough faith in and trust in to beat Donald Trump.
Josh King:
Everything can change in a dime. And in a couple of weeks, we'll see if they do change on that very dime. Lis Smith, thank you so much for coming Inside the ICE House.
Lis Smith:
Yes. Thank you for having me, Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Lis Smith, author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, our now from Harper. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Marina Stanley with engineering production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
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Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
