Harry Reid Profile

This New Yorker article is purportedly about the Sharron Angle-Harry Reid Senatorial race, but it's much more about the character of Harry Reid. Economically speaking, Nevada, like all intermountain states (like New Mexico particularly) is much more like a colony than it is independent (economically, Nevada is an appendage of California). Nevada, like the rest of the intermountain states, relies very, very heavily on the federal government. If Sharron Angle wins, she will not be able to replace Reid's contacts and expertise, and it will prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the state in general, and Las Vegas, in particular:

This jaunty hyper-confidence is the essence of the conservative mood right now—a sense that the tide is antigovernment, and sweeping everything along with it. Nevada is in such bad shape that comparisons to the Great Depression are justified. It has the highest foreclosure rate, the highest bankruptcy rate, proportionally the highest state budget deficit, and the highest state unemployment rate in the country. In Las Vegas, everywhere you look are empty buildings, abandoned construction sites, unkempt houses with for-sale signs in their yards, and apartment complexes offering spectacular deals.

...Sharron Angle, more than most other Republicans, has been willing to oppose government not just in general but in particular. Over the years, she has called for abolishing the Departments of Energy and Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and for privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. ... Reid kept saying that government should provide something that he knows is popular (like mandated insurance coverage of mammograms), and Angle kept saying that it shouldn’t. Reid plainly had gone into the debate with the idea that he could demonstrate that Angle is “extreme,” but nothing seemed to stick.

...It is a mistake, though, to regard Reid as ineffectual. He is obsessive in his work habits. Everybody in Nevada politics has a story about the brusque telephone calls he makes at all hours. He’ll check in as often as several times a day, for five minutes, two minutes, thirty seconds. You’ll be saying something and it will dawn on you that he has hung up without saying goodbye. Once, Reid recruited a candidate to run for an important state office, and during a phone call she complained about fund-raising difficulties: click. Reid doesn’t like whiners. He found another candidate.

“He is truly hard as a diamond, and tough,” Bryan says. “Nobody pushes him around. He’s always thinking one step ahead. He never forgets. Never forgets.” ... But what shines through is Reid’s lack of the natural gregariousness and geniality that most people associate with the political personality.

Harry Reid was born poor and out of wedlock in the desert mining town of Searchlight, Nevada. His father was a hard-rock miner who didn’t get through the eighth grade; Reid hints broadly that both his parents were drunks. ... Another time, Reid took a .22 rifle and went out to shoot a rabbit for dinner. With his last bullet, he merely wounded the rabbit, so he gave chase on foot for “what seemed like hours,” he wrote. “I got that rabbit. Took it home. Skinned it. Took it to my grandmother. . . . Best rabbit I ever ate.” At fourteen, Reid had a fistfight with his father (because he was beating Reid’s mother). At nineteen, he had a fistfight with his future father-in-law (because he opposed his daughter’s marriage).

Mike O’Callaghan, a high-school teacher and coach of Reid’s, taught him to channel his aggression by becoming an amateur boxer.

...Reid’s lack of natural electioneering talent and a certain over-aggressiveness in seizing opportunities led to an uneven career. He narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race in 1974, then ran for mayor of Las Vegas and lost badly. O’Callaghan rescued him in 1977 by giving him a job that nobody wanted: chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Charged with cleaning up the casinos, Reid faced down the real-life versions of the Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci characters in “Casino.”

The 1980 census showed that the state’s population had grown so much that Nevada got a new congressional district, in Las Vegas. Reid ran for the seat in 1982 and won—bringing with him to Washington, he writes, the gun he kept in his desk drawer in Nevada. When Paul Laxalt, who had beaten him in the 1974 Senate race, retired, in 1986, Reid ran for his seat and narrowly won. He has been reëlected three times and has become the deeply trusted protector of all the most established interests in Nevada. Still, only once in his long career has he won more than fifty per cent of the vote in an election. He’s a will-power politician.

In Reid’s accounting of his political life, there are more enemies than friends. ... Jack Gordon, a minor concessionaire at one of the casinos who dreamed of getting a full-fledged gaming license, tried to bribe him when Reid was head of the Gaming Commission. Reid called the F.B.I., which set up a sting operation that wound up ensnaring Gordon, but Reid’s attitude went beyond cool professionalism: “I lunged and got him in a choke hold. I was in a rage.” He took personal umbrage at George W. Bush. “I have made no secret of my antipathy toward the second President Bush,” he wrote. He added that Bush “is an ideologue who has done incalculable damage to the government, reputation, and moral standing of the United States of America.” He twice publicly called Bush a liar, explaining, “When one lies, one is a liar.”

...Other than a few close relationships, like the ones with his wife, Landra, and with Mike O’Callaghan, what most reliably draws warmth from Reid’s tempered-steel heart is New Deal liberalism. He likes to say that his parents’ religion was Franklin D. Roosevelt; practically the only good thing that ever happened in the life of his father was joining a union. “The American government is the greatest force for good in the history of mankind”; Social Security is “the greatest social program since the fishes and loaves.” Sig Rogich, a Nevada adman who worked in George H. W. Bush’s White House, and who, like most establishment Republicans in Nevada, is backing Reid over Sharron Angle, told me that during many evenings at his house he and Reid have relaxed to old Woody Guthrie songs on the CD player—“poignant songs about society and the poor.”

...On the morning after the 2004 election, Bush, reinvigorated and aiming for historical significance, indicated that he was going to turn Social Security into a system of individual retirement accounts, as Republicans had long dreamed of doing. Reid pounced. He brought Senator Max Baucus’s chief of staff, Jim Messina, into his office to create a war room and work the issue relentlessly. Messina, now the deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House, told me, “When Bush had his kickoff”—for the Social Security initiative—“Reid was already out ahead of him by a month, and by March or April of ’05 I knew we had won.”

...After Obama made his first speech on the Senate floor, in 2005, against the Iraq war, Reid approached him to compliment him on its eloquence. (Reid, who has never been as liberal on social or military issues as he is on the provision of government benefits, voted for the war.) As Reid tells the story, “And I will never forget his response. Without the barest hint of braggadocio or conceit, and with what I would describe as deep humility, he said quietly: ‘I have a gift, Harry.’ ” Surely, Reid’s sense of awe was intensified by knowing that Obama’s gift is one that he lacks. Conversely, Reid’s gift—relentlessly working the Senate Democratic caucus, member by preening member—is one that Obama lacked any interest in during his four years in the Senate.

In the House, an adept Speaker with a majority can herd her entire party caucus, using the Rules Committee, which decides what legislation gets to the floor. The Senate requires far more individual attention to the members, especially if they include people as ideologically disparate as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, and Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut almost-Republican. In the partnership between the Obama White House and the Reid Senate, Obama supplied the eloquence and grace and originated the policy ideas. Reid’s role was to get it done. Between Obama’s Inauguration, in January, 2009, and the congressional recess early last month, more consequential liberal legislation passed than at any time since the Great Society: health-care reform, the economic-stimulus package, financial regulation, a big education bill, the rescue of the auto industry, and the second phase of the rescue of the big banks. Others (a large expansion of protected public lands, funding for universal broadband access) didn’t get the attention they normally would have.

...His strength is knowing and playing to his caucus. He “has an amazing ability to figure out what the other person needs,” Billy Vassiliadis, a Las Vegas adman, Democratic political consultant, and old friend of Reid’s, says. In talks with the White House, Reid would explain that each senator is a “brand”: Maria Cantwell, of Washington, is high-tech; Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, is a Federalist; and so on. One had to understand each member’s sense of himself and then find a way to play to it.

...Angle is a curious political commodity: she seems marginal but always does better than people expect her to. She started out in politics as a member of the far-right Constitution Party, and in 1998 she won a seat in the state assembly as a Republican, and beat a rising star in the Party for reëlection in 2002. There she was anything but a prominent member; she was best known for voting against tax bills. Yet in 2006 she ran against Dean Heller for Congress and came within five hundred votes of beating him. In 2008, she ran against the senior Republican member of the Nevada state senate, Bill Raggio, and almost beat him. She is unlike Reid in almost every way except in her relentless determination.

Reid, as Majority Leader, has access to all the top national Democratic funding sources, as well as the ones in Nevada, and he has ceaselessly battered Angle in campaign ads. Yet she and Reid are in a dead heat in the polls. Reid’s prominence helps Angle financially, because it attracts donations from national conservative groups that want to take Reid out. Now she can afford to pound him in advertisements, too.

...As Nevada’s senior senator, Harry Reid, a teetotaller who doesn’t gamble, was at the center of the creation of this new social order. He delivered for the casinos, a heavily regulated industry that lives in fear of federal gaming taxes and relies upon airports and highways, and they supported his campaigns. None of the major casino owners have publicly endorsed Angle; Steve Wynn, who recently suggested on CNBC that the government of the People’s Republic of China is more hospitable to business than the Obama Administration, gave Reid twenty thousand dollars last year.

If you think of yourself as a champion of ordinary people, you can build a case for helping the casino industry. An unskilled laborer—a valet parker, a dishwasher, a chambermaid, a waiter, a busboy—can make more money in Las Vegas than just about anywhere else. Except for the Venetian and the Palazzo, all the big casinos on the Strip have contracts with the Culinary Workers Union, which has fifty thousand members, many of them Latino. They make high wages and have decent job security, a guaranteed full workweek, no-premium family health care, and company-paid pensions. It sure beats working in a mine, as Reid’s father did.

...Then, beginning in 2007, and escalating in 2008 and 2009, Nevada went spectacularly bust. Last year, the state lost population for the first time since the Great Depression. Next year, the state legislature will meet to balance a budget that, on a two-year cycle, has a three-billion-dollar deficit, on total spending of less than seven billion dollars. The construction industry—Nevada’s second-largest, after casinos, during the boom years—has nearly disappeared. More than half the students in the Clark County public school system are eligible for the federal school-lunch program. The school system used to have to recruit teachers from elsewhere because it was growing so rapidly; now it has a waiting list of two thousand job applicants.

...Late one afternoon, I met with Donya Monroe, a former basketball player for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and financial adviser with Merrill Lynch, who runs a counselling center for people with housing problems. She is a commanding woman—the daughter of a two-star general—but she looked weary. “It was literally mass hysteria here,” she said. “You had a large group of people from California who took advantage of the system. Come here, buy a house, no money down, take out a HELOC—a home-equity line of credit—use it to buy another home, get a second mortgage, get some cash. And then they’re gone—poof. They all came at the same time and they all left at the same time. Then, there’s another group, the people I deal with every day. Uneducated, sign here. Their payment has gone up. They lost their job. They’re panicked. A huge portion just walked away.”

Reid reacted to the bust just as you would expect. He helped extend unemployment benefits, gave special aid to schools so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, secured money for potentially job-rich alternative-energy projects in the desert, and funded foreclosure-prevention counselling.

...CityCenter, a vast new casino and shopping complex on the Strip, is the largest private building project in the history of North America. In 2007, its primary owner, MGM Mirage, took on Dubai World as a partner. With construction well under way and five billion dollars already sunk into CityCenter, the crash of September, 2008, hit. Dubai World sued MGM, and then the banks collectively announced that because Dubai World had sued they no longer had to honor their own obligations.

Harry Reid called Jim Murren, the chief executive of MGM, to offer his help. “I asked him to call Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J. P. Morgan, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and I’m sure he did,” Murren told me. “Everybody in the Nevada delegation called, but there’s only one Senate Majority Leader. That’s the call that got returned.” When a contractor needed a two-hundred-million-dollar payment in order to continue construction, “Reid called, the banks released the money, and we kept constructing.”

Murren, a Republican, appeared in the first television ad the Reid campaign ran this year, saying that Reid had saved twenty-two thousand jobs in Nevada with his calls to the banks. MGM is not just Nevada’s largest employer and taxpayer; it is proportionally among the largest single taxpayers in any state, supplying eleven per cent of the budget of Nevada’s government. Murren told me that Sharron Angle has never tried to meet him. She has said that she would not have made the calls that Reid made on CityCenter’s behalf.

The Reid campaign considered that comment a gift from Heaven, but it wasn’t able to sink Angle. Angle’s campaign ignores what would seem to be a basic rule of elective politics: that you have to promise to deliver government services to your constituents, especially in hard times. It may be that a large number of people in Nevada dislike Reid more than they like his works. ... It may be that people aren’t aware of Reid’s many services to the state. It may be that the unpopularity of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments, which Reid had so much to do with, outweighs the popularity of his more mundane local record. It may be that Reid gets blamed for the state’s depression because he was in office when it arrived. Or Sharron Angle could be right: many Americans don’t want the government to help them.

...People go to Nevada to loosen the bonds of traditional society and try something new. What has happened there over the past twenty years is a particularly American version of the economic cycle. European governments get into trouble by overloading on pensions and other expensive benefits; American governments get into trouble by practicing a kind of casino liberalism, in which credit flows too easily, everybody goes too deeply into debt, and if the growth ever stops, everything crashes. Now Nevadans are being presented with a great clash of social visions: help from Washington with Reid versus less of Washington with Angle. The stakes are real, not rhetorical. Reid’s reëlection campaign is about the role of government in the United States. Obama’s reëlection campaign will be about that, too.