Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the partisan pit bull and parliamentary tactician who is retiring after 34 years in Congress, insisted Thursday that GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a good friend of his, and touted the passage of Obamacare as one his biggest achievements.
Despite their intense ideological battles over the years, Reid said he and McConnell are both lawyers and “understand our relationship.”
“We don’t need to be hugging out here every day — we advocate for our causes,” he said in an emotional and lengthy speech spanning more than an hour. “This is not a love session for Reid and McConnell, although I want everyone to know that Mitch McConnell is my friend.”
After his wife was in a “dreadful [car] accident,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and when he hurt himself and damaged his eyesight, McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao, Reid said, “were there” with phone calls, flowers and genuine support.
“So everybody, make up all the stories you can” about how they hate each other, but “maybe somebody should write this: Thank you very much, Mitch.”
McConnell, who spoke before Reid, also acknowledged a friendship forged through the years despite their intense jousting.
“We have different sets of legislative priorities and different ways of doing things, we have endeavored to keep our disagreements professional, rather than personal,” McConnell acknowledged after a tribute to Reid’s life and public service.
“I hardly know what it’s like to serve without Harry Reid,” McConnell said, recalling their many battles over the course of decades working on opposite sides of the issues in the Senate but their common love of baseball.
Reid choked up as he recounted his hardscrabble beginnings in the town of Searchlight, Nev., where his mother washed clothes for the brothels and the casino workers, and his father worked in the mines.
As a young adult, he was ashamed of such humble beginnings but later realized it had contributed to his work ethic and success. That rough early childhood and his father’s later suicide after suffering from depression his entire life, he said, also is the reason for his staunch support for Obamacare and the idea of providing access to healthcare for more Americans.
He recounted about how he held onto the shame about his early beginnings in the “crummy” town of Searchlight through college and law school and into his first jobs in local government. He didn’t like to tell people where he was from or talk about his childhood until he attended a speech by Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” in which he urged people to be proud of who they are.
“And I walked out of that event that night a different person, a different man. I became Harry Reid, a guy from Searchlight.”
“I didn’t make it because of my athletic prowess, my good looks or because I was a genius,” he said. “I made it because I worked hard … I believe that’s a lesson for everyone.”
