Who Will Do What Harry Reid Did Now That Harry Reid Is Gone?
Who Will Do What Harry Reid Did Now That Harry Reid Is Gone?
Jason Zengerle
New York Magazine
“As my staff will tell you,” Reid said to me when we spoke the next day, “I’ve done a number of things because no one else will do it. I’ve done stuff no one else will do.” I expected him to give an example of a successful parliamentary maneuver or perhaps a brave political endorsement, but instead he mentioned one of the most disreputable episodes of his long career, when, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes. (Even though the facts were wrong, the accusation spurred Romney to release his tax returns, which showed he had only paid 14.1 percent.) “I tried to get everybody to do that. I didn’t want to do that,” Reid said. “I didn’t have anything against him personally. He’s a fellow Mormon, nice guy. I went to everybody. But no one would do it. So I did it.”
“What I was trying to say,” Reid told me, “is, ‘Be careful, because this is not all fun and games. The stuff he has said has been hateful and disruptive and crude and not helpful to anybody, and so be careful what you agree with him about.’ ” Adam Jentleson, a top Reid adviser, puts it more bluntly: “He was standing athwart the normalization of Trump, yelling ‘Stop!’ He wanted to show Democrats that this is how you should be approaching things.”
And that’s not the only Monday-morning quarterbacking Reid and his team have been doing since Trump’s victory. Those close to him are quick to note that Reid had urged Clinton to tap Elizabeth Warren as her running mate — going so far as to have a team of lawyers devise a way that Warren could resign her Senate seat so that her replacement, appointed by Massachusetts’s governor, would only serve for a few months before facing a special election (which would be the Democrats’ to lose). “You think having Warren on the ticket wouldn’t have meant 70,000 more working-class white votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin?” speculates a Reid adviser.
Similarly, last spring, when it was clear Bernie Sanders would lose the Democratic primary and Reid was working in concert with Clinton and Obama to ease him out of the race, he appeared to have successfully brokered the defenestration of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as Democratic National Committee chairman — a condition Sanders set for his departure — by lining up Richard Durbin to take her place. The only problem was Reid himself didn’t have the power to fire her. And neither Obama nor Clinton was ultimately willing to make the call to Wasserman Schultz themselves. “It would have been a big deal to fire her back in May, since it would have signaled to Bernie’s supporters that, ‘Hey, this is your party, too,’ ” laments the Reid adviser. “Instead, there was no positive when we did finally fire her.”
Reid insists he has no regrets about bowing out just as Democrats are getting ready to do battle with Trump. “If Hillary had won and had a Democratic majority, I would have really missed the action,” he told me one afternoon in his Capitol office, as he sat under a giant oil portrait of his favorite writer, Mark Twain. “With this, no, I’m not going to miss it.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
