A leader from the wilderness
The scoop on new Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is that he has a sense of humor, which in his current circumstances may qualify as a survival tool. But this revelation almost always comes with the amplification that Reid's is a dry sense of humor, molded perhaps by the desert terrain in which the senior senator from Nevada grew up.
Left unsaid is that it is often hard to tell whether he's joking or not. "We crack up all the time," confesses Reid's Senate colleague from Nevada, John Ensign, a conservative Republican who lost a nasty Senate race to Reid in 1998 by 428 votes before winning against a lesser opponent in 2000. "He has a very good, dry sense of humor that works well in small groups."
Most powerful. But Harry Reid just graduated from the small-group business. Last week, his 43 Democratic Senate colleagues formally chose him as the face and the force of the Democratic Party. Reid now assumes the tag of "most powerful Democrat in Washington" and the responsibility of leading the opposition to a Republican Party that will return to the capital in January with a tighter grip on all the levers of power. The Democratic minority in the Senate, with its filibuster powers, is now the only check on the White House and its ambitious legislative plans. Reid takes that responsibility seriously. "The Senate," he says ominously, "was not established to make things easy. It was set up to make things better."
Reid knows he's holding the short end of the stick: John Kerry walks among the vanquished; there are expanded GOP majorities in the House and Senate; and, most deliciously for Republicans, Tom Daschle, the longtime Democratic leader in the Senate, has been toppled. Daschle drew the wrath of the White House and congressional Republicans for stopping key parts of their agenda.
But Republicans may soon be struck with a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for: Reid and Daschle were joined at the hip politically, and for much of the time that Daschle was at war with Republicans, Reid was his chief gunner as Democratic whip. "There is certainly some of what Daschle had in Harry Reid, except maybe nastier," says Jon Ralston, a veteran Nevada political analyst. Adds Reid: "If they [Republicans] want to get something done, they have to work with us. They can't just run over us. There are millions and millions of people in this country whose views we represent."
Still, in Reid's willingness to deal and his soft-spoken, folksy demeanor, many see the dawn of a new age of bipartisanship. GOP leaders are complimentary. "Republicans did not trust his predecessor," says Ensign. "With Harry, if he says he is going to do something, you know he's going to do it." Majority Leader Bill Frist says he expects to work well with Reid. Former Majority Leader Trent Lott describes Reid as a trustworthy adversary.
And Reid, an anti-abortion Mormon and former Capitol police officer who's not up for re-election for six years, may make a more difficult target than Daschle. "I think it is good for Democrats that America woke up this week and heard that their new leader was pro-life and pro-gun," says one Democratic staffer.
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