Harry Reid's dilemma

Many of his fellow senators were born rich and politically connected, but not Harry Reid.

His first home was a shack made of wooden railway sleepers, soaked in creosote to keep the termites out. (Predictably, it burned down.) His home town, Searchlight, Nev., had 13 brothels but no church. A local law said no brothel or bar could be too close to a school. When one dive was found to have broken this rule, they moved the school.

Reid’s father was a hard-drinking gold miner. His mother took in laundry for the bordellos. His father sometimes beat her, until the 14-year-old Harry and his younger brother jumped him to make him stop. Young Harry hitchhiked 45 miles to high school and did countless odd jobs, from mucking out cattle to digging graves.

Once he stole some returnable bottles, but a brothel-keeper spotted him and set him straight. When he was 32, his father shot himself. Going through the family papers, he learned that his parents were married after their children were born.

As the majority leader of the Senate, Reid is now one of the most powerful people in the country. Yet he could wait in line for a bus without being recognized.

His looks are bland, his voice is soft and he would be the first to admit that he is not much of a public speaker. When he started his inaugural address as majority leader, his fellow senators at first did not notice and carried on chatting. A poll by George Washington University found that 38 percent of Americans had never heard of him, and another 16 percent had no opinion about him.

Many Nevadans barely know him, either. Because the state has grown so fast, an estimated 30 percent of voters did not live there when he last ran for office in 2004. Which is why he is already blasting their screens with his biography, even though the election is a year away.

“When the mob took over (Las) Vegas, Harry Reid took them on and didn’t blink, even when they put a bomb in the family station wagon,” says one ad. This is true: As head of the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981, he crossed swords with Tony “the Ant” Spilotro and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. A character loosely based on Reid appears in Martin Scorsese’s film “Casino.”

Tough on crime, yet understanding of sin — Reid should be the ideal candidate for Nevada. He is also a family man and, like many Nevadans, a Mormon. Yet if the election were held today, the polls say he would lose.

Nevadans are unhappy. The frenzied economic growth that saw the state’s population double between 1990 and 2007 has reversed. House prices have crumpled, joblessness has soared and even casinos are going bust. People used to blame George Bush, but that memory is fading.

To make matters tougher for Reid, there is a tension between his two jobs: shepherding Barack Obama’s agenda through the Senate and representing his home state.

He wants to avert climate change, but stymies the expansion of nuclear power by blocking plans to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nev. He wants to mend the budget, but also needs to shower Nevadans with pork. Mindful of the legions of old people in Nevada, he describes Social Security as “the greatest social program since the fishes and the loaves” — when in fact it is stumbling toward bankruptcy.

He wants to make health care universal — unsurprisingly, after seeing his father pull his own teeth rather than pay a dentist’s bill. But heaven forbid that more coverage for the young should mean cuts in Medicare, the health scheme for the elderly. And Reid is insisting on a special deal whereby an expansion of Medicaid (health care for the poor) in Nevada will be paid for by the federal government, not Nevadans, for five years.

But if Nevadans don’t like Obama’s health care reforms, they will blame Reid; along with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, he is now running the process that should eventually meld the various reform bills into a single version.

Reid is not a deep thinker. In his memoir, “The Good Fight,” the closest he comes to outlining a political philosophy is to say that “the American government is the greatest force for good in the history of mankind” and that Republicans “cannot abide the thought of (its) helping someone.” But he is a good listener, which is why Democratic senators like him so much, and a canny horse trader, which is why they picked him as their leader.

Because the Senate’s rules allow a 41-vote minority to block nearly anything and there are only 60 Democrats in the Senate, Reid’s job is delicate. He has precisely no margin for error on a party-line vote. So he has to reach out to a Republican or two, and stroke nervous Democrats from conservative states. He keeps cards in his pocket to note down his colleagues’ demands and grievances, and tries to satisfy as many as he can.

It is a thankless task, inviting attack from both sides. The national Republicans would love to unseat him (a fate they inflicted on the last Democrat to lead the Senate, Tom Daschle, in 2004) and are churning out ads portraying him as a “super-spending partisan.” Republicans detest him for calling Bush a “loser” and “one of the worst presidents in our history.”

They also scorn him for declaring that the Iraq war was “lost” and for ridiculing the notion that the surge of American troops there might succeed. Meanwhile, campaigners on the left assail him for not pushing hard enough for a public health-insurance plan.

In the coming months, Reid could help bring radical change to the United States, reshaping the way people pay for health care and consume energy. But next year, he could lose his job.

He will not fall without a fight, as the boxers he used to spar with will attest. And even if he loses, his son Rory might be Nevada’s next governor. Harry Reid might have been born in a town with no telephone, but he still hopes to start a dynasty.

From the Economist magazine.