North CarolinaRaleighWashington, D.C."I
kept raising my hand and saying 'Do not give up on North Carolina. Send us your best and your
brightest, please,’" remembers Thompson, who's been involved in the
state's political scene for years.
Later,
when Thompson heard Averell "Ace" Smith was coming to town, he was happy
to hear his state was getting, as he says, "the A-Team." Smith is one
of the Clinton camp’s elite on-the-ground
operatives, and the use of Smith, who cut his teeth running Antonio
Villaraigosa’s 2005 mayoral race in Los Angeles
and Jerry Brown’s 2006 California
attorney general contest, indicated that even when Hillary was behind double
digits in the state, she was planning an ambitious campaign there. Twice this
campaign, in California and Texas, he has been handed the reins of a
do-or-die state--and twice he has delivered.
Yet,
unlike so many other big-time strategists--particularly big-time Clinton
strategists--he’s thought of as someone who doesn't seek the limelight, a
behind-the-scenes guy who'd just assume it be about the candidate. Indeed,
descriptions of Smith pretty much universally go like this: He wears glasses. He's not big into ties. His
hair is grey and thinning--well, what isn't gone is thinning." He looks
like someone's dad," Thompson says. "Some folks might have dealt with
him and not realized that it was Ace they were talking to."
His
demeanor as a manager? Polite, even-tempered--the anti-Mark Penn. While in North
Carolina, he's been listening to Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz's
"Iberia"
suite, a masterwork of piano music with four books of three pieces.
"I never
get stressed out in any circumstances," Smith told TNR.com, calling it one
of the important qualities of a manager. "Ninety percent of mistakes are
made by people making emotional decisions under pressure."
He's also,
apparently, lethal. "Ace is like Bobby DeNiro in The Untouchables--he always brings a gun to a knife fight,"
says Chris Lehane, a former Al Gore and John Kerry staffer who has known Smith
for a decade and likes him.