Harry Reid was hoarse and hacking, drawn and more stooped than usual on a Sunday morning 12 days before Christmas. It was not yet noon, and Reid was in his second-floor corner office in an empty United States Capitol. He had arrived to bad news.Howie P.S.: Money quote:Joseph Lieberman, the independent Connecticut senator, had announced on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he would not support the Senate health care plan, which meant that Reid did not have the 60 votes he needed. Lieberman’s announcement, which torpedoed a compromise that Reid helped to midwife, caught the Senate majority leader by surprise. Reid had spoken with Lieberman two days earlier, and one of Lieberman’s top aides participated in the Saturday-afternoon conference call that Reid orchestrates for Democratic senators who will be appearing on the Sunday talk shows. “He double-crossed me,” Reid said stiffly, associates later recounted. “Let’s not do what he wants. Let the bill just go down.”“The caucus has great loyalty to Harry,” Obama told me. “So I want Harry there for the rest of my first term.”Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, arrived at Reid’s office not long afterward — casually dressed, a cup of coffee in one hand — and after a brisk meeting, a decision was reached: Reid would abandon his compromise, which was intended to appease proponents of a government-run insurance plan. The concession would not sit well with a lot of Democrats, not to mention the powerful constituency of union voters in Nevada, where Reid is up for re-election in November. But there was little discussion. Reid and Emanuel are exemplars of the just-get-it-done style of legislating. As it turned dark outside, Reid began pulling senators aside in the lobby just off the Senate floor, speaking in a strained whisper as he presented the case in characteristically pragmatic terms. “I’m with you; I’m for you,” he told Tom Harkin of Iowa, one of the Senate’s traditional New Deal Democrats, who was pained that the public option was dying.
“Harry has a very good way of sort of bringing you back to reality,” Harkin told me a few days later, “this wonderful way of shrugging his shoulders and saying: ‘If you can get Lieberman to vote with you, fine. Otherwise, chalk it up and move on.’ He calmed me down.”
Reid looked disconsolate as he shuffled between the Senate chamber and his office, festively decorated for Christmas and bustling with senators and White House officials. The director of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, waved down Reid to solicit his view on what sounded like a technical dispute about Medicare. Reid listened, nodding wearily, before drifting out the door. “You guys figure it out,” he said.
Lieberman was not the only senator in the Democratic caucus complicating Reid’s life. Ben Nelson of Nebraska was opposing using government money to pay for coverage of abortions. Maria Cantwell of Washington was balking as well; she had been drawing Reid into long, late-night telephone conversations as she pressed to make sure that longshoremen were added to the list of unions exempted from a new tax on costly health care plans. And Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, was threatening to bolt over the discarding of the public option, a provision that senators like Lieberman refused to support.
A week later, Reid announced that he had struck a deal with Nelson and had his 60th vote. It was a display of legislative legerdemain that if not pretty — Nelson’s vote cost a promise of millions of dollars to cover Nebraska’s Medicaid expenses — was impressive. Reid needed 60 votes to head off a filibuster, and Republicans were vowing to filibuster everything, which meant he needed all 58 Democrats and both independent senators. He had no margin for error. “Harry has the toughest job in Washington,” President Obama told me one afternoon last month, leaning forward in his chair in the Oval Office on the eve of the Senate vote, talking up a legislator whom Obama first met during his four-year tour in the Senate and whom he now sees as pivotal to his success as president. “He’s done as good of a job as anybody could have done. He just grinds it out.”
The health care negotiations demonstrated Reid’s command of the Senate and his sway among his fellow Democrats — which contrasts with his perhaps equally remarkable inability to master other elements of the contemporary politician’s game. Despite Reid’s quiet demeanor, he has an almost pathological propensity to say things that get him in trouble. He is a model of indiscipline in a city that feasts on the errant remark. In January, he would have to apologize to President Obama after being quoted in a new book, “Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, as saying that Obama would be able to become the nation’s first black president because he was “light skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Republicans promptly demanded Reid’s resignation as majority leader, seizing a chance to push Reid to the sidelines in their ongoing effort to derail health care reform — and most of the Obama agenda, for that matter.
However the health care negotiations end — with a Rose Garden signing or a last-minute debacle — Reid has another battle waiting at home: to save his seat in the Senate. The longer Reid has served as Democratic leader, the more Nevada voters have turned against him. It’s a challenge that regularly confronts politicians who have to balance the demands of being a Congressional leader with maintaining political viability back home. For the third time in 16 years, Republicans are trying to oust one of the top Democratic leaders in Congress, as they successfully did with Reid’s predecessor as Democratic leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, in 2004, and with Tom Foley in 1994, when he was the speaker of the House. If Reid loses in November, it is hard to imagine either party selecting a Senate or House leader from a competitive state like Nevada anytime soon. “He lives in a purple state, and he is pursuing a deep-blue agenda, and that’s tough,” Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told me. “He’s shown a lot of loyalty to his party and to his caucus to his detriment, and I admire that.” The cheers for Reid in Washington are not being heard back home: a poll conducted this month on behalf of The Las Vegas Review-Journal found that Nevadans disapproved of the health care bill. Reid’s attempt to slip in financing to offset Nevada’s Medicaid costs, precisely the kind of vote-getting sweetener that could display his worth to Nevadans, came under fire in Washington, so he withdrew it rather than risk having the bill unravel.
For all the power and the glamour — the personal relationship with a president, the corner office in the Capitol, the place in history — it is hard to see why anyone would want to be Harry Reid in today’s Washington. Reid spent almost all of last year as a partisan leader in a partisan battle, which is pretty much what he should not be doing if he wants Nevadans to send him back for a fifth term. He as much as anyone ‘The atmosphere in Washington has changed dramatically,” Reid, who was elected to the Senate in 1986, told me. By nature a pragmatic deal-cutter, Reid is viewed with suspicion by the left, which cannot understand why he has to play ball with the likes of Lieberman. He has to sate a long-deprived and lopsidedly left-leaning Democratic conference hungry to pass big legislation, anxious that its 60-vote margin will evaporate after November. “When I took over in 2001, no one had high expectations, so everything we did was appreciated,” Daschle told me last fall. “Now there’s an expectation that we can do everything.” Reid goes home to Nevada to face polls showing him trailing his opponents — polls that, if of questionable significance this early, are psychologically debilitating. “Numbers at this point are really meaningless, but they haunt you and are an indication of the work you have to do,” Daschle said.
That Reid is on the line in the midterm election of Obama’s first term seems appropriate. It was Obama who moved Nevada back into the Democratic column at a time when Western states had become fertile ground for the party. But the economic anxiety that has settled over the nation is perhaps nowhere more on display than in Reid’s home state, which has the highest mortgage-foreclosure rate in the country and is tied with South Carolina and California for the third-highest unemployment rate. Harry Reid has two different missions to fulfill this year — one for Barack Obama and one for Harry Reid. On many days, the two seem very much at odds.
•A sharp wind cut across the desert just before Thanksgiving as an S.U.V. carrying Harry Reid navigated a grid of streets lined with trailers in Searchlight, Nev., whose population of 798 includes the majority leader of the United States Senate. “This used to be a whorehouse!” Reid exclaimed, pointing a finger toward a ridge. “That was one of the biggest whorehouses around. Right there — you see the fence over there? — we put a nice new mobile home for my mother after my dad killed himself.” His father had worked in the gold mines and was an alcoholic; that is one reason, Reid says, that he does not drink himself. There was not a building (or a whorehouse) in sight as the S.U.V. rumbled over a rise and came upon a scattering of tombstones, poking out of the sand and dirt. Reid ordered the car to stop. The dropping sun threw a golden light over the desert hills. Reid was wearing jeans and had pulled a jacket over a brown knit sweater with brown leather elbow pads. “O.K., Searchlight Cemetery. It’s been here since 1900. Where else can you find a place like this?” he said. “It’s not owned by the county, not by no one. Whatever they want to put in here, they put in here.” He wandered among the tombstones in this common graveyard, grown over and weathered by the years, pointing out a brother here, a great-grandmother there. “As Landra knows, I’m going to be buried here,” he said cheerfully, speaking of his wife. “She knows she’s going to be buried here.”
By reputation and appearance, Reid, who is 70, is one of the blander elected officials in Washington. Upon closer inspection, he is deeply and deceptively interesting. He is a senator from Nevada who hates gambling (“The only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government”); a backroom deal-maker who does not drink alcohol or coffee; a Washington celebrity who sniffs at the dinner-and-party circuit. “Senator Daschle went to dinner almost every night with someone,” he told me. “I go to dinner never, with anyone, during the week.” He does find time, at least twice a week, to slip on a pair of black Lycra stretch pants to do yoga with Landra at their apartment in the Ritz-Carlton. He has an intolerance for fat people, manifested in asides to aides who seem to be getting portly and an office staff that is suspiciously slim. He was born out of wedlock. He is certainly one of the few members of the Senate to have a Grateful Dead poster, signed by the band’s members, hanging in a bathroom at his house. Reid has been an amateur boxer, a Capitol police officer and the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, where his tenure inspired death threats and a character in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” The mezuzah on the right side of the doorway in Searchlight is a reminder that Landra was Jewish before they converted to Mormonism.
Tall and slight, with rimless glasses and neatly trimmed gray hair framing a gaunt face, Reid does not cut a memorable figure. “I have beady eyes,” he volunteered to me one day. His voice barely rises above a mumble. “I have always been one who recognizes my, um, shortcomings,” he said in November as he sat with his wife in the living room of the house they built eight years ago on a remote patch of land dotted with sagebrush and abandoned gold mines, 60 miles south of Las Vegas. “Landra and I had a conversation this morning; I hope she’s not upset about me telling you this, but she won’t stay upset for long if she is.” Their discussion was about a story in The Washington Post that said, as he put it: “ ‘Reid gave a rousing speech, but as usual you could barely hear him.’ People are always telling me, writing, you know: He has bad posture. He doesn’t talk very well. He doesn’t look very good.”
Reid is well known for his stumbles, the malapropism or the just plain weird moment like when, in a spasm of confusion and fatigue, he initially voted against his health care bill on Christmas Eve. When Reid goes before the TV cameras — which is something he does not enjoy doing and, as he would be the first to tell you, is not particularly good at — he often shows up with an oversize index card with remarks, typed and vetted by his aides, in anticipation of the sensitive question of the moment. He reads the card dutifully in a monotone, eyes down, and then takes a few questions before his communications director, Jim Manley, shouts out, “Last question!”
Despite, or perhaps because of, these precautions, he takes a schoolboy’s delight in acting out, in breaking the rules of a scripted city. At one point last year, Reid announced that the health care vote would be delayed until January no matter what the White House thought, which led Rahm Emanuel to get into his car and arrive at Reid’s office, where after a terse exchange between two terse men, Reid agreed to the White House’s schedule. He referred to angry protesters at town-hall meetings as “evilmongers.” He called George W. Bush a “liar” and a “loser.” When Bush invited Reid for coffee in the Oval Office in the final weeks of his presidency, the president’s dog walked in, and Reid insulted the president’s pet. “Your dog is fat,” he said.
“I’m just who I am, O.K.?” Reid told me before Christmas. “I didn’t take lessons on how to speak on television, and I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about who I am. I don’t like to read stuff about me, but I’ve become accustomed to it: you know, ‘Reid misspeaks.’ I’d rather people were saying, Oh, that guy is a golden-tongued devil.” He paused. “I have no regret over calling Greenspan a political hack. Because he was. The things you heard me say about George Bush? You never heard me apologize about any of them. Because he was. What was I supposed to say? I called him a liar twice. Because he lied to me twice.”
Manley, who was sitting nearby in Reid’s Capitol office, raised his hand to respectfully revise and extend the senator’s remarks. “Just for the record, he did apologize for the loser comment,” he said.
“Yes, but not because he wasn’t a loser,” Reid countered. “It’s because I shouldn’t have said that to a group of kids.” It was a Las Vegas high-school civics class. The apology also came after his most prominent Republican supporter in Nevada, Sig Rogich, a Las Vegas businessman who was a senior adviser to Ronald Reagan, called Reid to tell him that he had crossed a line.
The comments about Obama’s race may be more problematic, particularly as Reid confronts a bleak re-election landscape in Nevada. After Reid’s aides were asked by the politics editor of The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder, on Friday night about the passage in the book, they stayed up until 2:30 a.m., fashioning a statement of apology and drawing up a list of 35 civil rights and political leaders for Reid to call. Manley called Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, to inform him of what was happening and set up a call between the majority leader and the president. Reid telephoned Obama the next day. When Obama asked if there was anything he could do, Reid asked if the president could put out a statement of support. The White House obliged. (A few days later, a Reid aide e-mailed to remind me that Reid has a towering portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the foyer of his home in Searchlight.)
For someone whose life is about discretion — almost without exception, Democrats describe Reid as trustworthy, loyal and fierce about keeping a confidence — Reid can sound surprisingly candid when he discusses his colleagues. He was unapologetic about his dust-up over delaying the health care plan with Emanuel, who used to hold the No. 4 leadership post in the House. “Rahm is a House-oriented guy,” Reid said in November, as he settled, unnoticed by the late-afternoon gamblers and diners, into a booth at the Searchlight Nugget, a lost-in-time casino where coffee goes for 10 cents a cup. “It’s hard for him and most everyone in the White House to understand how the Senate operates.”
He said he had been shocked by the behavior of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, since returning from his failed bid for the presidency. “My disappointment — no, that’s the wrong word; I’ll try to find a better word. My amazement has been John McCain. I thought he’d turn out to be a statesman, work for things. He’s against everything. He’s against everything! He didn’t used to be against everything.”
He said he thought the White House erred in trying to win the support of Olympia Snowe, the Republican senator from Maine, for a health care compromise. “As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with her,” he said, “because she had no intention of ever working anything out.” And while making clear that he was not complaining, he said Obama may have been asking for too much in his first year. “I personally wish that Obama had a smaller agenda,” he said. “It would be less work.”
Reid is so self-demeaning and ostensibly deferential that it is easy to overlook his ambition. But it is there: in 2004, he started making calls to line up support to replace Daschle as minority leader even before Daschle officially conceded losing his Senate seat. Yet his comfort in the shadows is what has helped him manage a sea of egos and agendas in a caucus that includes Bernie Sanders on the left and Ben Nelson on the right. He said he skips the Sunday talk shows because he is an anemic television presence, but that gesture, as Reid surely knows, has earned him the loyalty of colleagues who relish the platform, like Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Durbin of Illinois, two members of his leadership team. “He’s not a showboater, and I think that probably does help,” says David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama. But, he added, it “probably doesn’t help him at home.”
Committee chairmen and chairwomen, the Senate’s traditional barons who lost some power in the past two decades, have found themselves newly ascendant under Reid. “Other leaders who I’ve worked with and respect, like Tom Daschle, would say, ‘We need a task force; we need to bring in people who aren’t chairs,’ ” Durbin says. “Harry is very respectful to committee chairs, and they are loyal to him as a result of that.” Reid is a transactional politician, unashamed to dole out an earmark to win a vote, a bit of sausage-making that draws him condemnation in editorials. There are days, aides say, when they almost feel like concierges as Reid — hearing a fellow senator was going to Las Vegas, and seeing a way to build good will and promote his home state — asks them to line up restaurant reservations, choice hotel rooms and hard-to-get show tickets. By contrast, “I have never heard him threaten a member,” Durbin says. Reid said he disdains the tough-guy style of one of his more famous predecessors, Lyndon Johnson. “I don’t think he’d last for five minutes today,” Reid said. “You can’t bully.” Besides, he added: “I couldn’t be Lyndon Johnson if I wanted to be. He was too crude and physical for me.”
For the White House, Reid is a gift in a challenging year. Conciliatory, endlessly patient and pragmatic rather than dogmatic, he has different skills from those of some senators who might otherwise be in his spot — like Schumer or Durbin — and he seems suited to this time and this caucus. Nor is he perceived as carrying an ideological agenda. Unlike most of his colleagues, he opposes gun control and abortion, but those views are reflected only when he votes and do not color the way he manages or negotiates a bill. “Harry by any normal criteria would be considered a moderate Democrat,” Obama told me. “He’s someone who doesn’t think in big ideological terms.”
Reid’s legislative skills were on display throughout the months that led to the Christmas Eve vote. By suddenly inserting a public-insurance option into his bill — catching the White House and some of his colleagues by surprise — he demonstrated to supporters of the public option that they did not have the votes for it. He got credit from Democrats like Harkin for doing what he could to try to pass it. Lieberman took the blame for killing it. And Reid got his 60 votes.
•The notion that Reid could lose in November seems ludicrous to Sig Rogich. “Why would we ever want to get rid of the majority leader, arguably the most powerful man in Congress, at a time when Nevada needs him at the table?” Rogich said, sitting in his Las Vegas office with a view of four casinos: the MGM Grand, Bally’s, the Paris and the Bellagio. Reid is surely the most influential senator Nevada has sent to Washington since it became a state 146 years ago. He has delivered millions of dollars in aid and almost single-handedly blocked the federal government from turning Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Vegas, into a national nuclear-waste repository.
But of course he could lose. Independents — whose numbers in Nevada have grown by 25 percent since Reid was last elected — are put off by the partisan politics that are, by definition, personified by a majority leader. Yet no matter how much he has given himself to the service of Obama’s agenda, Reid is not partisan enough for many liberals. And then there are conservative voters, who certainly appear motivated to come out to vote against what they see as an out-of-control big-government agenda advanced by Obama and Reid. “You have a candidate who hasn’t been the most popular elected official in the state, who is pushing an agenda that is completely at odds with the constituents in his state, and you have an economic environment that is the worst the state’s ever faced,” says Danny Tarkanian, one of a half-dozen Republicans lining up for the chance to oppose Reid. He is the son of Jerry Tarkanian, the former University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball coach, as big of a celebrity as you can find in Nevada.
Polls that show Reid trailing potential opponents may be of little meaning 11 months before an election — before he has an opponent, much less unleashes the campaign he is preparing. “Right now he’s shadowboxing against himself,” Emanuel told me. That said, it is significant that 52 percent of Nevadans had an unfavorable view of Reid in a poll published by The Las Vegas Review-Journal this month, before the latest controversy broke; and it’s even more significant that that view did not change despite months of sunny Reid campaign advertisements on Nevada television stations. Nate Silver, the political blogger and polling expert, compared Reid’s position in the polls with that of Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey last fall; Corzine lost with only 45 percent of the vote. What’s more, one-third of Nevadans eligible to vote in 2010 have registered since 2004, the last time Reid was on the ballot. The electorate he will face this November is entirely different from the one that sent him to the Senate in 1986, a consequence of representing a state that is growing so fast.
“He is vulnerable because he is living in a center-right state and he’s lost touch with the people who put him there,” says Sue Lowden, another prospective Republican challenger, a former television news anchor in Las Vegas who was the No. 2 runner-up for Miss America in 1973 (she was Miss New Jersey). Reid has been in public life in Nevada since he joined the State Assembly in 1968. “I think there’s Reid fatigue,” Jon Ralston, the political columnist for The Las Vegas Sun, told me. As if that were not enough, there could be two Reids on the ballot this fall: his son, Rory, is running for governor. No one in the Harry Reid camp is happy about this; Harry Reid’s voice dropped to an even more imperceptible level than usual when I inquired if he asked Rory to sit this one out. “Well, I’ll talk about anything except my son,” he said. “I’m not going to do that. He’s been a wonderful son, great example to his brothers and sister. He didn’t ask my permission to run, and I didn’t think he needed to get it.”
Reid has won and lost tight elections, and he has been arming himself for this one. He hired a campaign manager a year ago; he already has 14 people on his campaign payroll; and he gave a strategically timed interview last year to announce that he would spend $25 million to keep his seat, a staggering — and utterly credible — figure that helped finance those early advertisements. His staff has scrubbed the business and voting records of all of his potential challengers.
And he has done what he could to choose his opponent. Jon Porter, a three-term member of Congress, was considered one of Reid’s toughest potential foes — until he was defeated in 2008 by a Democrat, Dina Titus, who benefited from the largess of Reid’s political operation. Last August, Dean Heller, a Republican member of Congress and another potentially strong challenger, called Reid to tell him that he would be sitting this one out; Nevada Democrats suspect Heller reconsidered the wisdom of abandoning a safe seat to challenge an incumbent with $25 million in the bank. That leaves a bench of second-tier candidates like Tarkanian and Lowden, who have far less campaign experience, money and institutional backing than Reid. That might be the single-best thing going for him right now.
African-Americans are expected to make up just 5 percent of the Nevada electorate come November, and the list of people Reid called after President Obama included some of the top black officials in the state, who quickly declared their allegiance to the Senate majority leader. Even so, Reid’s comments about Obama do seem likely to feed the enough-already atmosphere that is hurting Reid back home.
Still, the bigger and more meaningful test will be the fallout from the bill that has consumed Reid this winter. Obama said he understood why Nevadans are opposed to the health care bill now, but he says that will change. “Well, if you’ve got insurance companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars scaring the daylights out of people into thinking that somehow this is a government takeover of health care, that it’s unpaid for, that it means huge new taxes on them, that it’s going to mean higher premiums — if that’s the information you’re getting, shoot, I’d be against it, too,” the president told me. “Once this thing is passed and signed, then suddenly The New York Times and other newspapers are going to have a big article saying what does this mean for you, and people will take a look at it and say, ‘You know what, this is a lot better deal than I thought.’ And I think that will serve Harry very well.”
Reid better hope so. Two days before Christmas, he sat stiffly in a straight-back red leather chair, the fireplace behind him casting a glow over his office on a cold winter morning. From here, Reid could gaze down the National Mall, white with snow, the Washington Monument on the horizon. That day, at least, had been a good day for the senator from Nevada. He had his 60 votes, the reviews were in and Reid, self-effacing or not, was eager to share them with me. He rose from his chair, walked over to his desk and picked up a clip from Politico, a collection of laudatory quotations highlighted in yellow by Reid’s staff. “Every one of these — look, Ross Baker, a professor at Rutgers — they all say the same thing,” he said. “I’m not tall, dark and handsome. But here’s what it says: ‘Behind the scenes, his genius really comes to the floor. He’s a virtuoso, a legislative technician. Whatever else can be said of health care reform, it’s Reid’s finest hours.’ ” This need for validation was startling, if understandable. Health care will almost certainly be the toughest legislative challenge he will ever face. But after this, there are more assignments from Obama in the year ahead, potentially on contentious issues like immigration and climate change. And they are again going to force Reid to balance the demands of his president with his own campaign.
Reid has the fortune of carrying out what some see as the most ambitious legislative agenda that a president has handed to Congress in a generation. And that could be his undoing.
“He lives in a purple state, and he is pursuing a deep-blue agenda, and that’s tough,” Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told me. “He’s shown a lot of loyalty to his party and to his caucus to his detriment, and I admire that.”
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