CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 31, 2008 – 6:08 p.m.
CQ Profile: A Wily Inside Player, Reid Is Key to Obama Agenda
By Chuck McCutcheon, CQ Staff
Nevada’s Harry Reid carries considerable influence as Senate majority leader, but you might not know it from watching him.
He shuns self-promotion and avoids the social circuit; he once passed up a White House state dinner honoring Queen Elizabeth II to stay home with his wife. He can be taciturn, even dour on television, and often speaks in such a whisper that, to start off 2008, he revealed a New Year’s resolution: “I’m going to try to talk louder.”
But he more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings by being the consummate inside player.
Reid called his 2008 autobiography “The Good Fight,” a reference to the combative ex-boxer’s willingness to enter a tussle. As leader of the Senate Democrats in the 111th Congress (2009-10), Reid can expect far fewer scraps with the White House than when it was in Republican hands, plus an expanded base of Democrats that will give him greater leeway to operate. But he isn’t assured of a totally peaceful life.
Reid will be under pressure to push through the Senate the Obama administration’s ambitious agenda to revive the economy and plans for energy, health care and other matters. He will need to corral at least a few Republicans to support those efforts, while keeping the liberal core in his own party satisfied. And he’ll have to deal with a conservative-leaning GOP caucus keen on embarrassing him tactically and defeating him at the polls in 2010.
A wily parliamentarian, Reid can be persuasive behind closed doors. He was instrumental in talking former Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords into leaving the Republican caucus in 2001, handing Democrats a majority until 2003. He also ensured that Connecticut independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman was not booted from the Democratic Caucus late in 2008 for enthusiastically supporting Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain ’s presidential bid.
Reid has a respectful relationship with Kentucky GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell , his savvy rival as minority leader. As longtime appropriators, Reid and McConnell became well acquainted and mastered the art of horse trading and greasing bills with earmarks. They have worked together on various shared objectives, but both are fierce partisans as well.
Reid also has forged close ties to his Nevada GOP colleague John Ensign ever since an acrimonious 1998 Senate race in which Reid barely edged out Ensign.
He promotes bedrock Democratic values, but he is apt to consult with conservatives with whom he shares some beliefs on social issues. A practicing Mormon, he often votes with Republicans in favor of restrictions on abortion. He also is a defender of his state’s economically important mining industry, so he can be skeptical of new environmental controls. And he was among the handful of Democrats to cross party lines in 2004 to vote against renewing the 10-year federal ban on assault weapons.
Reid has devoted most of his quarter-century in Congress to leading the opposition to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in his state, an issue that unites Nevada politicians. With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considering a license for the site as politicians of both parties call for greater use of nuclear power, Reid’s dealings with the Obama administration on the project’s future will be instructive.
When Reid ascended to majority leader in the 110th Congress (2007-08), he was quick to lay out an agenda tracking the issues Democrats used to oust Republican incumbents in the 2006 election. By the end of the session, he could point to several accomplishments, including an increase in the minimum wage, increased funding for veterans’ programs, new lobbying rules, an energy bill, a farm bill and economic recovery packages for the housing and financial services sectors. “Democrats were able to achieve many things for the American people,” he declared in October 2008.
But Reid and other Democrats had just as long a list of legislation they were unable to bring to fruition — new funding for embryonic stem cell research, an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a program to stem greenhouse gas emissions and an end to the Iraq War. With Republicans often relying on filibusters to block legislation, Reid frequently resorted to parliamentary moves, including a record number of cloture votes, to keep GOP amendments from being ruled in order.
Reid is routinely critical of the GOP’s tactics, displaying a sharp edge that sometimes lands him in trouble. In May 2005, he had to apologize for calling President Bush a “loser” in remarks to Las Vegas high school students; his autobiography is laden with criticism of the president he calls “King George.”
And in 2007, he declared that the war in Iraq “is lost,” a pronouncement some Democrats thought went too far. Ethical concerns are another potential weakness for Reid. In 2006, he amended his Senate financial statements to reflect a previously undisclosed $700,000 profit on a land deal with a businessman friend in 1998.
Even the opening of the Capitol Visitor Center in Dec. 2008 brought Reid headlines; he mentioned at a ceremony that he wouldn’t miss the hot days when “you could literally smell the tourists” in the hallways. He makes no apologies, though, for his bluntness or anything else. “I believe something to be right and I do it. And then I don’t worry about it,” he wrote in the opening chapter of “The Good Fight.” “This has not always necessarily served me well, but it is who I am.”
Before being elected leader, Reid was the party’s second-in-command as the whip for six years under Tom Daschle. When Daschle was defeated for re-election in 2004, Reid in a matter of hours lined up the votes he needed to move up.
When Democrats won control in 2006, there was no question Reid would make the transition from minority to majority leader. In the previous two years, he had held Democrats together to prevent then-Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee from passing a reduction in the estate tax and rallied his troops to stop Frist from taking away the minority’s power to filibuster judicial nominations. A bipartisan group of senators, the Gang of 14, struck a deal to keep the GOP leadership from permanently altering Senate tradition.
Reid grew up in a cabin without indoor plumbing in the tiny mining town of Searchlight, Nev., on the edge of the Mojave Desert. His mother was a high school dropout who took in laundry to support the family; his father was an alcoholic miner who killed himself at 58.
As a young man, Reid was an amateur middleweight who sometimes sparred with pros in exhibition fights. (He still does 120 pushups and 200 sit-ups each day.) But he wanted out of Searchlight and a boxer’s hardscrabble life.
He applied himself to his studies, boarding with families 40 miles away in Henderson to attend high school, where he became student body president. History teacher Donald O’Callaghan, also the local Democratic chairman, took notice and helped arrange a scholarship for Reid at Utah State University.He earned a law degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., while moonlighting as a U.S. Capitol Police officer.
Reid returned to Henderson and, at age 28, won election to the Nevada Assembly. When O’Callaghan became governor in 1970, Reid was elected the youngest lieutenant governor in state history. He made a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1974 but lost to Republican Paul Laxalt. A few years later, O’Callaghan appointed Reid chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, giving him oversight of the state’s top industry at a time it was tainted by organized crime. Reid later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “They put bombs on my car, there were threatening phone calls at night, people tried to bribe me and went to jail.”
In 1982, Reid won the first of two terms in the U.S. House. He tried again for the Senate in 1986 and won with 50 percent of the vote over GOP Rep. Jim Santini. He has had a few close calls since. In 1992, Democrat Charles Woods, a wealthy broadcast executive, held Reid to 53 percent in the primary. In the general election, Reid outspent GOP rancher Demar Dahl 5-to-1 to prevail with 51 percent.
In his 1998 campaign, Reid won by only 428 votes over Ensign, then a House member from Las Vegas, in a bitter contest. Reid called Ensign “an embarrassment to the state,” and Ensign described Reid as an “old card shark.” The two reconciled after Ensign was elected in 2000 to the state’s other Senate seat.
Reid has wasted little time in preparing for a serious challenge in 2010; as of Oct. 2008 he had raised more than $4.4 million. He has become enough of a fixture in the Silver State — which Obama easily won after Bush carried it twice — that Republicans will have a difficult time unseating him.
Comments
If Reid is the best the Democrats can do, then they're in trouble. Reid has caved in to the republicans on some important issues such as telecom immunity and the auto maker's bailout. I'd be willing to bet the he doesn't get any of Obama's programs past the gop in anything resembling the original form, or in a form that will truly help the economy. He may be good at earmarks, but he's not a leader.
An embarassment to the state? I live in Nevada and Reid manages to embarass me nearly every day. Signed, Just another smelly tourist
Despite the joint resolution in 2002 of Congress approving the disposal site at Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste (provided it can be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) Majority Leader Reid ignores that decision and has vowed to defeat the project. He offers in its place to have the federal government take over storage of spent nuclear fuel at 72 nuclear power plants in 34 States indefinitely (at unknown costs) and for the government's weapons and other nuclear waste remain at Dept of Energy sites (at unknown costs.) He got Obama during the campaign to "take the pledge" to stop Yucca. It seems none of his colleagues will challenge this Leader's one-man rule.
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