I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of the Bakardic Celles podcast today.

I'm like a lot of these shows.

I have friends, but this is somebody who's really near and dear to my heart.

She is amazingly talented and smart and funny and witty and

she will cut your balls off all at the same time.

None other than the incomparable Liz Smith.

How are you?

Great, especially after that introduction.

I am just so proud of you in this book. We always start my show the same way though, which is by having our guest walk us through the arc of their career.

And you've advised campaigns and candidates at every level of government.

Talk about the moment when you realize that the work that you do now would be your calling

and what keeps you in politics when you obviously could be doing with your skill set a million other things?

Well I mean it would take like two hours to go through the arc of my career. But just briefly I started I took a term off from

college in 2004 and I was an intern on John Edwards presidential campaign and it was then that I knew that I was a goner for it.

I traveled from I was in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio for him, traveled all over as an unpaid intern.

Then I went, I took another term off and I was a field organizer for Tom Bashal. And then from there it was off to the races. I did Senate race for Claire McCaskill. I did a bunch of Google races in Kentucky, Virginia, New Jersey. I did the Obama

re-elect in 2012. I did some New York races including Mayor DeBlazio in 2013 and then Martin O'Malley's 2016 campaign and then Pete Buttigges 2020

campaigns. So, but yeah, what's the first campaign I did I knew I wasn't going to

be able to do anything else. I mean how do you escape from politics? I mean I think a lot of my

listeners on this show are junkies because they're listening to me talking more about politics and everything else every single day but how do you escape from it?

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