Tina Smith Is Working On It

Tina Smith is at work. Her office walls in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., are mostly white with only a few pieces of art. The one-and-a-half-term senator is still moving in. She shakes hands with visitors—a judge from Minnesota on a trip with her family, a group of high school students. Then, it’s meetings with the National Pork Producers Council and the St. Cloud Area Chamber of Commerce.

She listens, asks questions, maintains focus and eye contact. Her staff take diligent notes. Then it’s time to vote. She takes the underground passage to the Senate floor. Then, up the escalators, slipping past Joe Manchin surrounded by a swarm of reporters. Manchin’s been in the news. He seems to always be in the news. Smith walks by smiling. She’s got work to do.

I watch her enter the chamber through the wooden doors. Standing in the hall, I remember: Fifteen months ago, rioters filled the halls of the Senate. I remember the pictures and the video clips filling social media in a rush. I remember watching from my hairstylist’s chair in Iowa, thinking that the world was ending while I had foils on my head. I remember the flags, the guns, the angry faces, the fear. A man in a Trump 2020 flag on the Senate floor rifling through papers. A man in black tactical gear hanging from the balcony. I try to square the past violence with the polished floors and whispered professionalism of the present moment.

It’s April 6, 2022. The cherry blossoms in D.C. are just ending their bloom, and the sidewalks are carpeted with fallen petals. Everyone in suits walks with purpose, clacking across shining floors, past paintings of important men. Here, at least, life is all decorum and polite nods and handshakes. And here, at least, it’s easy to believe there was no insurrection. That America is just fine. That more than a million Americans haven’t died from a pandemic.

This is the eye of the storm of American politics. And the people here are holding all the pieces together while the country collapses around them. Smith is one of those people—kindly and competently working through crisis after American crisis.

“We need Tina Smith. We need a steady hand. An experienced woman,” says former Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist Lori Sturdevant. “We don’t need a politics of passion. We need a politics of reason.”

But is it going to be enough? Are the quiet machinations of a hardworking woman ever going to be enough to steer a country wrecked by the pugilistic politics of the Trump administration; pandemic; insurrection; economic chaos; and the reversal of voting, LGBTQ, and abortion rights? Smith is from a generation of women who experienced more freedom than their mothers, watching as a new generation of women experience fewer rights than her. Roe was decided when she was 14. She was 64 the year it was reversed. But she isn’t despondent. For Smith the answer is, as always, to keep doing the work.

During the insurrection, Smith was forced to rush from the building for her safety. She remembered seeing Capitol Police sprayed by rioters.

Today, she leaves the Senate floor calmly. I follow her back to her office. The work doesn’t stop.

We ride the elevator up with Senator Joni Ernst and her communications director, who’d rushed to catch it. Both Ernst and her staffer are coiffed and polished, Ernst in a pink suit jacket with cream pants and pearls; their makeup is flawless. Smith is less made up, wearing a navy suit and comfortable shoes. It’s an awkward ride. Ernst is a Republican from Iowa, Smith a Democrat from Minnesota. Two neighboring states, one blue, one red. But Smith is all smiles. She says hello and mentions a meeting they both have been invited to attend; Ernst demurs—she won’t be there, something else came up—and rushes off the elevator.

When I ask Smith if it’s awkward to face colleagues who have denied the pandemic, who supported overturning the results of the election, or Democrats who refuse to approve vital legislation like Build Back Better, she smiles.

“We find things we can work on together.”

She has a theory about two Capitols: the one you see on cable news, the one of shouting and headlines, and the one that quietly gets the job done. As she explains this to me, she has to take a call.

“We have to work to get this done,” she says to someone she calls Elizabeth.

For more than 20 years, Tina Smith has been working behind the scenes of Minnesota politics—a driving force behind Walter Mondale, Mark Dayton, and the charismatic former Mayor R. T. Rybak. Lori Sturdevant describes Smith as the person who steadied the boat for male politicians; a capable political manager who has never gotten the full credit for all her work. She’s been following Smith’s career since her days as Rybak’s chief of staff.

“She’s been a workhorse, not a show horse,” says Sturdevant.

Senator Amy Klobuchar describes Smith  as “a positive person and as someone that rises to the challenge of our moment. That’s what she’s doing.”

In 2018, when Al Franken, the comedian turned Minnesota senator, resigned amid sexual assault allegations, it was Tina Smith, then lieutenant governor for Mark Dayton, who was appointed to fill the seat. Smith served for half a term before running for and winning the seat in 2020.

“I didn’t consider anyone else for the role,” Dayton tells me. “It was always going to be Tina.”

“And isn’t it about time that the women who’ve been making men like me look good got the credit and the positions they deserve?” says Rybak separately.

In many ways, Smith is still the quiet force working in D.C., alongside the bigger personalities of Minnesota politics: Dayton, Rybak, Mondale, and then Franken. All men whose names and legacies still loom large and complicated.

But Smith, everyone tells me, is good—uncomplicatedly good. She works hard and wants to help and tries to do that even as our systems crumble; she still believes in them, still knows how to work them, still sees in them and in America something to be salvaged.

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Christine Elizabeth Flint was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1958. The oldest of three children and the only girl, she was named after her mother. Smith tells me she was the typical older sister, a rule follower, bossing her two little brothers around.

“Who do you think you are? Miss America?” they’d ask her.

Her father, F. Harlan Flint, was hired as the general counsel of the New Mexico State Engineer’s Office and the Interstate Stream Commission in 1963. In 1970, Flint took a job as the land and legal manager for BP Alaska Company, a subsidiary of the British Petroleum Company. And he also served as vice president of the Santa Fe School Board. Newspaper articles show that Smith’s parents were active in the community and in politics. In 1967, Christine and Harlan signed a statement published in the Santa Fe New Mexican calling for the end of the Vietnam War, which stated, in part, “We know that millions of Americans share the anguish we feel. If they have been silent up to now, we plead with them to speak up. If they have spoken before, we plead with them to speak again. Americans must create a public outcry that will force a reappraisal and a new direction.”

Despite having an outspoken father, Smith didn’t dream of being a politician. Her dad told her she could do whatever she wanted to do. She told him she had to figure it out first.

In a 2018 article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, journalist Steve Terrell collected the recollections of family and friends of the Flints, who recalled Tina as a fearless girl who loved the piano. “Longtime local resident Marie White said in an email: ‘The first time she came to our house on Canyon Road, when she was about 2 years old, I went to hand her a large toy teddy bear that made a rather fierce, growling noise. … Terrified, she said in her very deep voice, ‘Bear won’t hurt you!’ She convinced herself.’”

Others recalled Smith as fun-loving and gregarious. White’s son, Pete, a lawyer, said he “thought she was pretty and nice and didn’t beat me up like some of my older sisters’ friends did.”

Still, it came as a surprise to her family when she became a senator.

“It never occurred to us,” Smith’s father told the paper. And maybe that’s because she was never the little girl dreaming of being president or the polished TV-ready personality. She’s always been diligent and kind, words not always associated with politics, even in Minnesota.

Still, Rybak describes Smith as learning an important lesson from her childhood: how to talk to anyone. “Tina’s the daughter of a very diplomatic person and a very direct, plain-spoken midwesterner,” he says. “And I think she has a good dose of both in her.”

At 19, Smith worked in a kitchen at a construction camp in Prudhoe Bay, for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, to earn money for college. “I wasn’t allowed to touch anything hot or sharp,” she recalls. Smith then went to Stanford and majored in political science, because she was interested in public policy. From there, she went to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. That’s where she met her husband, Archie, at the first-year barbecue.

In 1984, the Smiths had a choice: They could move to Boston or Minneapolis. They chose Minneapolis because Archie had gone to camp in the Boundary Waters as a child and had fond memories of the state. Smith took a job at General Mills. They had their first child in 1987 and their second in 1989. After a couple of years, Smith decided she wanted to get more involved with the community, so she started working in campaigns as a volunteer, knocking on doors for Ted Mondale’s 1990 legislative race against Phyllis McQuaid. She went into apartment complexes to knock on doors there too. She says everyone wrote off apartment complexes because the logic was that renters don’t vote. Smith recalls that advice feeling wrong to her, so she came up with a plan for organizing the apartment complexes. Mondale won, and Smith became a close friend of the family.

If there is one truism of modern Minnesota politics, it is that Smith has always been there, always working, always in the shadow of someone else. After the first campaign, Smith worked to raise money for local candidates, from county commissioner to state senate races. She worked with every losing Democratic governor’s race for 12 years.

“I know what it’s like to lose,” she tells me.

In 2002, Smith was senior advisor for Roger Moe, the DFL candidate for governor. It was a busy year that ended in tragedy.

On October 25, 2002, the twin-engine airplane carrying Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone; his wife, Sheila; his 33-year-old daughter Marcia Markuson; campaign assistants Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic, and Mary McEvoy; and pilots Richard Conroy and Michael Guess crashed near Eveleth on the way to a funeral. Everyone on the airplane died.

Smith was at Moe’s campaign office when she heard the news. She called Walter Mondale, but he didn’t pick up—he was with Senator Ted Kennedy at a fundraiser at the Minneapolis Club.

“It’s funny I would do that,” she told this magazine in a 2003 interview. “But I had developed a habit of calling him whenever I heard something interesting. He seemed to appreciate that.”

Mondale learned of Wellstone’s death at the fundraiser.

Dan Cramer, Wellstone’s director of field operations, was in the room when Wellstone’s campaign staff learned of his death. He recalled people screaming and sobbing. “It was gut-wrenching.” The grief spilled out from the campaign offices and flooded the state. As the news broke, people began gathering outside campaign headquarters, crying, carrying candles and flowers.

In those hectic hours, when no one knew what would happen, grief-numb, Walter Mondale’s name was floated, along with state supreme court justice Alan Page, state attorney general Mike Hatch, and Wellstone’s son David. Mondale hadn’t run a campaign since his 1984 run for the presidency. He lost to Reagan, only winning the electoral votes of the state of Minnesota, which gave him 13 electoral votes to Reagan’s 525. But Mondale was ultimately chosen. David Wellstone told him that it’s what his parents would have wanted.

And Smith, of course, was there to help. She was the manager for the 13-day campaign. It was close, but in the end, Mondale lost to Republican Norm Coleman 49.53 percent to Mondale’s 47.34 percent. The rest of the votes were split among third-party candidates.

After that race, Smith decided she needed some stability and took a job as the vice president of external affairs for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Smith grew up hearing stories from her grandmother about friends who had to obtain illegal abortions. Smith’s mother was a married woman when the Griswold case was decided. Griswold v. Connecticut was a 1965 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that a state law banning the use of birth control violated a right to marital privacy.  Smith was a college student in 1976, just three years after Roe was decided.

By 2003, when Smith worked with Planned Parenthood, the fight for abortion access had turned to the state level. Smith recalled that a lot of her early campaign activism and organizing involved communicating how abortion access was being restricted as states with Republican-led legislatures tried to undercut the right to an abortion with laws like 24-hour waiting periods and fetal personhood laws.

In her time at Planned Parenthood, Smith saw the struggle for abortion up close. Roe, taken for granted, had never been codified into law, and states had been slowly eroding abortion access for years. Abortion doctors were installing bulletproof glass in their homes because of high-profile murders and death threats. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the threat to abortion access was always there. But that’s hindsight. It’s always harder in the moment to listen to the people on the ground doing the work—and that’s where Smith has always been.

Smith returned to state politics when she was hired as Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak’s chief of staff. A state political operative told me that in Minnesota politics there was the general sense that Tina Smith was the quiet fixer: the woman who was called in to clean up the messes of male politicians.

This is how Smith worked for years in Minnesota politics for Rybak, and then for Governor Mark Dayton.

Former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges describes Smith as a lovely person, noting that she was the focus and savvy that Rybak needed, righting the ship of his rocky first term as mayor. Hodges also describes Smith as a political operator who works without ego.

Rybak also admitted that more than once Smith saved him from disaster. It was Rybak who gave her the nickname “the Velvet Hammer,” a nod to her effective use of soft power. The term velvet hammer has long been a moniker for the execution of feminine power. It’s a compliment, but also a constraint.

It’s a term that encompasses the paradox of women in power: You may wield influence, but you may not do it too harshly. Be soft, but effective. Be successful, but don’t reveal ambition. Be good, but not too good. Perfection is seen as annoying, but the slightest mistake could be devastating. And never, ever let them see the whites of your eyes. The Tom DeLays of the world get to be nicknamed “the Hammer,” but the Tina Smiths of the world are called “Velvet Hammers.”

“I, of course, will fight in every way that I can.... But it’s not just me fighting. I want to say, ‘You too; you keep up the fight.’”

—Senator Tina Smith

It’s a complex matrix of expectations, one that Smith has managed well with humor and diplomacy. And unlike other politicians, Smith is careful not to complain about the double standard, even as she smacks right into it. Smith isn’t going to blow up the system. She will not subvert it. She still believes in it. It’s not that she doesn’t have tough language: Smith is a skilled communicator who isn’t afraid to call out political chicanery when she sees it. But she’s not a firebrand. She is one of a legion of women competently, and fervently, working in a country as it implodes. You get the sense that even if the world ends, she will be there in the rubble, cracking jokes and organizing the cleanup efforts.

And if, under the functional suits and easy smiles, there is any resentment, it doesn’t show. For Smith, the answer is always: Do the work.

“It was funny. She was every Republican’s favorite Democrat until they understood what she stood for,” says Rybak, referring to Smith’s very progressive politics.

But it allowed her to get work done. Both Dayton and Rybak point to Smith’s quiet but effective leadership in working out the new Vikings stadium and Destination Medical Center—the latter the largest economic development plan in Minnesota history.

Rybak met Smith working on the Bill Bradley 2000 presidential campaign. In 2005, when Rybak ran for reelection, he recalled that Smith gave him excellent advice. And so, when he won, he asked her to be chief of staff.

“It was clear I needed someone who could help run the office and build the relationships necessary for me to get the work done,” says Rybak.

In her new role, Smith helped coordinate a new kind of relationship between the mayor’s office, the city council, and the city coordinator. But it was the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007 where Smith showed her true leadership.

On August 1, 2007, just after 6 pm in the middle of rush hour traffic, the bridge collapsed into the Mississippi, killing 13 and injuring 145. Rybak and Smith delivered a lot of bad news around then, and the job of the messenger often fell on Smith. But Rybak remembers that no matter how bad the news was, people would leave her office laughing. That humor made her easy to work with. And the city was able to work with a Republican governor and Republican-led legislature to rebuild the bridge quickly.

“So, I called her the Velvet Hammer, but I think that made people underestimate how very tough she could be,” says Rybak. “And I think we’re seeing that right now with the incredible moral outrage she feels about the Supreme Court turning its back on women in need. And over these next few months, as this fight heats up, people are going to see that the Velvet Hammer clearly understands the hammer.”

When Smith was tapped to be Governor Mark Dayton’s lieutenant governor, Sturdevant wrote that Smith wasn’t being tapped because of her appeal to a specific subset of the electorate. Rather, it was a position she’d earned through hard work. It was working with Dayton’s office that Smith hammered out the details for the Destination Medical Center economic project, which brought together public dollars and private investment to make the city of Rochester, where the Mayo Clinic is located, a global center for medical care. Rybak tells me that these sorts of deals can often lead to state governments footing the bill, with little private investment. But in this case, Rybak notes, “The state of Minnesota’s investment of $68 million in the Destination Medical Center has leveraged $1.26 billion in private investment.”

And at the time, there were whispers she’d run for governor. And maybe she would have, if Franken hadn’t resigned—yet another crisis that required Smith’s cleanup skills.

November and December of 2017 were the height of the #MeToo movement, and Americans seemed to wake up every day to a new story revealing the abuses and assaults perpetrated by men in power. The New York Times wrote that the movement “brought down” 201 men that year. Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. But it’s probably more accurate to say that the men were responsible for bringing themselves down; #MeToo and the stories that welled up from the voices of American women were just revealing the ugliness that had always been behind the more polished faces of power. Minnesota Senator Al Franken was one of the men accused. Specifically, several women accused him of groping and inappropriate kissing, charges Franken has largely denied. Still, amid the news stories and the accusations, Franken announced his resignation on December 7, 2017.

Mark Dayton recalls being surprised by Franken’s resignation. But he knew what he had to do. He had Smith go to D.C. and meet with Chuck Schumer. She hadn’t considered the Senate. It hadn’t been in her plans. But she knew she could do it. And more importantly, she knew she was the best person to do it. She remembers waking up at 4 am the day after her meeting with Schumer with a sense of clarity.

“It was this moment of, Don’t be afraid. This is what you need to do,” she says.

At the press conference announcing her appointment, Smith recalls, there was a reporter who questioned her about what made her think she could do the job.

She replied, “I should not be underestimated.”

When Smith was appointed to her seat, she hired all of Franken’s staff. And she recalls a story: One of Franken’s staff asked one of her aides, “How will we know when Tina’s mad at us?”

“You won’t,” her aide replied.

Since his resignation, Franken is often in the news, declaring himself to be wronged and falsely maligned by society. When I ask Smith about him, she describes him as a friend and tells me it was his choice to resign. But she doesn’t dwell on the past; right now, she has a job to do.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Smith’s counterpart in the senate, tells me that when Smith stepped into the role,     she didn’t need much help.

“She was already experienced in the politics of getting things done,” Klobuchar says. The women are friends, really.

Klobuchar laughs when she tells me this. Politics is always pitting people (especially women) against each other, but Klobuchar has been at the weddings of Smith’s children and even quarantined at Smith’s house when she was exposed to COVID in early 2020.

“I ate her last burrito,” Klobuchar says.

Klobuchar tells me that so much of being a senator, especially as a woman, is doing work behind the scenes, writing the bills, making concessions, and allowing other egos to get the headlines. It’s about coming back year after year to try to close the “boyfriend loophole” on the Violence Against Women Act; it’s about so many small things that matter that are not seen or remembered but that make a huge difference. Smith, she says, does that work and does it diligently.

In D.C., I see this in action. Smith is on a transportation subcommittee hearing with South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds. They listen to experts discuss busing and buses in rural America, the challenges of updating buses and finding bus drivers. At the end of the hearing, Senator Jon Ossoff videos in to make a statement. In contrast to the somber, everyday, dusty drudgery of the hearing, the coiffed, well-lit senator from Georgia seems piped in from another reality, and he speaks words that seem to have little relation to what had happened in the room. He makes his speech as if he’s on CNN, and then, he’s gone. Smith and Rounds smile and continue with the work.

Klobuchar says that the way to stay sane is to take the job seriously but not to take yourself so seriously. This is where Smith’s sense of humor and lack of ego come into play. But she isn’t quiet. As a senator, she’s stepped into the spotlight.

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When Smith and I get together again, it’s in Minnesota. I’m following the senator around as she helps to launch an electric car initiative between Minneapolis and St. Paul and learns about the needs of an after-school program. It’s May 13, 2022—just 11 days after the Supreme Court draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked. As we sit in a café eating sandwiches, America seems balanced on a knife’s edge. The weather in Minnesota has been fickle, cold then warm, and it feels impossible to know what will happen next.

Smith assures me they are doing everything they can, but without all of her own party’s senators on board, their power is limited. She doesn’t mention Joe Manchin by name, but the reality that he voted with the Republicans against the abortion bill that the Democrats tried to push through just days before sits like a demon on the chest of the conversation.

As the only member of the Senate who has worked for Planned Parenthood, Smith has taken the lead on speaking out on abortion. She co-wrote an op-ed in The New York Times with Senator Elizabeth Warren and cosigned a letter to the administration, calling for them to do more to shore up access to abortion. She’s gone on cable news to do the complicated dance of calling on Americans to organize and vote while also demonstrating that elected leaders are doing everything they can.

But is it enough? Smith tells me that she’s not afraid to speak out. Because she doesn’t have a long-standing Senate career, she has, in her mind, nothing to lose from fighting. Plus, after losing a lot in her early career, she’s not afraid of it.

She pauses between bites.

“There needs to be a lot of soul-searching in the reproductive rights movement about understanding how we got to this point and what we need to do differently,” she says. “Because we can’t just sort of continue to do the same things over and over again and think we are going to get a different outcome.”

I press her. What can we do differently? How can we fight this? She tells me we have to outorganize and vote.

“People seem frustrated by the ‘Just vote’ message,” I tell her.

I think of my text conversations with friends. So many of them are women just like Smith, the hardworking, unseen women behind so many corporations and institutions and campaigns. Already, so many of them have donated and volunteered, even while working and raising children in a pandemic. Women who are burned out, exhausted, trying to figure out childcare while schools close because of COVID or teachers who are on strike. Women whose babies couldn’t be vaccinated, even as the rest of the world moved on. Women who had relief through a childcare tax credit, only to see that taken away. Women who are now facing the reality of a country where we will have fewer rights than our mothers. Women who were once told we could be anything we wanted to be, only to grow up to see our rights taken away. We were pushed out of the workforce in 2020—the year that the American woman screamed for help. But it’s 2022, and the only change has been for the worse. We don’t have the energy to scream anymore. We are working. But we are also so very exhausted. The stakes of this question are our very lives.

We are all velvet hammers, exhausted from contorting ourselves to fit a society that doesn’t care. The Urban Dictionary definition of velvet hammer notes that the woman who is the velvet hammer is “very beautiful and probably will someday save/rule the world.” Reading that is infuriating. Why do women have to save a country that won’t save us? And it’s 2022, and despite doing all the work, women haven’t been allowed to rule—but we still have to do the work.

“I think these women feel like, ‘We did vote, what more do you want from us?’” I say. “‘We did our job, now you do yours.’”

Smith doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t crack. She knows what it’s like to lose. She’s not going to quit.

“I don’t have the power to force people to vote differently from how they’re determined to vote,” she says. “And, I mean, democracy isn’t about winning one election and then going home and not worrying about it anymore because somebody else is going to do the work.”

Smith then tells me how recently she saw someone while she was walking around Lake Harriet who thanked her and told her to keep up the fight.

“I, of course, will fight in every way that I can, with every fiber of my being, for the things that I think are right for my state and my country,” she says. “But it’s not just me fighting. I want to say, ‘You too; you keep up the fight.’”

And I hear what she’s saying. We have to keep working. What other choice is there?

Then, after a series of losses, Democrats suddenly pass major legislation on health, taxes, and climate.

The afternoon the news breaks, Smith tweets a CNN story—“Manchin and Schumer announce deal for energy and health care bill”—with a photo of the aforementioned senators. The text of Smith’s tweet reads, “Holy shit. Stunned, but in a good way. $370B for climate and energy and 40% emissions reduction by 2030.” The tweet makes it seem as though the bill surprised her. Of course, for the senator who just keeps working on it, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I reach out to see if she had any role in the legislation. I expect Smith to demur, but, uncharacteristically, she doesn’t.

“Taking action on the climate emergency was one of the most important issues to me when I came to the Senate,” she says via her spokesperson. “I was determined to get something done. In the Senate, I joke that I’m a founding member of the ‘Never Give Up Caucus,’ but I mean it. So, when Senator Manchin said he wasn’t walking away from negotiations, we kept pushing. My staff also played a crucial role getting the Inflation Reduction Act accomplished. They worked relentlessly to find a path forward, including dozens of calls and meetings and teaming up with staff from other Senate offices like John Hickenlooper from Colorado and Ron Wyden from Oregon. And we did it!”

I think about what Rybak told me. Isn’t it about time?

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Lyz Lenz is the author of God Land and Belabored. Her profiles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review and Vanity Fair.