Radical REASON

Lis Smith has a plan to get the Dems out of disarray

-  Joe Hagan

LIS SMITH BLAZES into the neon-lit bar on a Friday night, wearing Daisy Duke cutoffs and high-top Vans, ordering the cheapest beer on draft, and queuing up Whitesnake's hair-metal classic "Here I Go Again" on the jukebox. "I'm meeting you in here in booty shorts," Smith acknowledges. "This is how I dress when I go around the West Village in the summer."

We're not far from Smith's New York City apartment, and the Democratic operative is already living up to her shoot-from-the-hip reputation. According to Smith's recent memoir, Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC's Morning Joe once advised her to tone down her "sex kitten act" if she wanted to be taken seriously as the brains behind the Pete Buttigieg campaign for president in 2020, a meteoric political run that Smith helped architect. Others might have viewed Brzezinski's advice as sexist, but not Smith.

"In a perfect world," she says, "women would wear whatever they wanted, look however they wanted, and no one would form their impressions of them based on that. But it's not how the world works. And it's especially not how the world works in a male-dominated industry."

In a sense, this pragmatic insightSmith took Brzezinski's advice, switching to jeans and cowboy boots-encapsulates her brand of political wisdom. As a next-gen gunslinger who's worked with everybody from Senator Claire McCaskill to President Barack Obama, she wants to school Democrats on how to win races in polarized America. She's come under fire for criticizing what she calls "the online leftist echo chamber" that she says turns off voters who reside somewhere west of Manhattan and right of AOC. When Smith recently told Vanity Fair's Inside the Hive podcast that the left's "schoolmarm vibe" alienated voters, it sparked blowback that Smith was using "gendered" language in her critique. "They proved my point!" she says, downing her beer.