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.
Citing Reid's contradictory reputations as a shrewd, ruthless insider and a bipartisan, conciliatory deal maker, Ralston recently described the 64-year-old grandfather of 15 as a "functioning schizophrenic--the angry partisan who is at once asked to be the leader of the sometimes not-so-loyal opposition and the friendly negotiator who is called on to forge the compromises that seem out of reach of others."
Sounds good, but there is little agreement on what needs to get done. Reid does not buy into much of the agenda being advanced by the White House or its GOP allies in Congress. For instance, he is against personal retirement accounts: "If someone wants to privatize Social Security, they are going to have to find someone else to get in bed with other than me," Reid told a television audience in Nevada recently.
It's the sort of plain speaking that reflects Reid's distinctly western upbringing in tiny Searchlight, Nev. In 1946, Wallace Stegner, the poet laureate and Pied Piper of the American West, described Searchlight this way: "Twenty years ago Searchlight had nothing to show but crumbling shanties with lizards on the sills, the sad open mouths of drifts and prospect holes, rusting machinery. Now it lies on a paved highway linking Boulder City and Needles. In the sprawling central square the false fronts wear new paint, mostly orange. We count seven bar-and-casino joints, and even the cafe where we stop for a beer has a crap table, a twenty-one table, and a battery of slot machines."
The year Stegner penned that passage, Reid turned 7. He grew up in a shack in Searchlight, about 50 miles south of Las Vegas, the youngest of four boys, in a family scarred by tough times and debilitating poverty. His father, a hard-drinking miner, killed himself, and among the first things that young Harry Reid felt compelled to do when he began making money as a young lawyer was to buy his mother dentures. She had been toothless for years.
One thing missing among the bars and casino joints in 1950s Searchlight was a high school. Reid had to bum rides to school in Henderson 40 miles away. He boarded with families there during the week and cadged rides back home on weekends. Reid's years at Basic High School were pivotal. He met the woman he would marry, Landra Gould (they are the parents of four sons and one daughter). He won his first election there, for student body president, and he met Mike O'Callaghan, the boxing coach at the local Boys Club, who turned him into an able welterweight. O'Callaghan helped guide Reid through college and law school, and when the old coach ran for governor in 1970, his running mate was a 30-year-old freshman in the state legislature named Harry Reid, who became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history.
Taking chances. After Reid lost races for the U.S. Senate and Las Vegas mayor, O'Callaghan appointed him to chair the Nevada Gaming Commission, which meant confronting organized crime's influence in the casino industry. Reid's effectiveness was such that authorities once found a bomb rigged to his car. For a long time after that, he turned on his car by remote control.
Reid served two terms in the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate in 1986, the same year as Daschle, whose Election Day loss he still mourns. "I'm only in this job because of the unfortunate loss of my brother," he says, his tone making it clear that he is not yet in a forgiving mood about the way Republicans went after Daschle. Majority Leader Frist, breaking with tradition, was the first party leader in recent memory to campaign against the other party leader on his home turf. "I'm trying my best to get over that," Reid says. "But my responsibilities here in the Senate are not of a personal nature."
Perhaps not. But when you're as passionate as Reid, it's hard not to take things personally. A reporter once asked him why he was so bent on punishing a law firm that had crossed him. Reid responded: "I believe in vengeance." It's hard to tell whether he was joking or not.
"The Senate was not established to make things easy."
Born: Dec. 2, 1939
Family: Married, wife Landra. Five children, 15 grandchildren
Education: Utah State Univ. B.S., 1961; George Washington Univ. J.D., 1964
Public service: Nevada assemblyman, 1968-70; lieutenant governor, 1970-74; U.S. rep., 1983-87; U.S. senator, 1987-present
This story appears in the November 29, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.