SEARCHLIGHT, NEVADA, is a timeworn desert town of under 600 people about an hour south of Las Vegas. Its heyday was long ago, when the promise of gold attracted hard-rock miners to the area’s brown and red hills. But what gold there was is now gone, and with it the miners, gamblers, prostitutes, and other frontier rogues. Today the town is desolate. The rusty hills sigh resignedly under the weight of mobile homes. Its time, one would think, has passed.
Yet Searchlight experienced a sort of renaissance last week, as the national press turned its attention toward the town’s most famous native, Senator Harry Reid. On November 16, Senate Democrats elected Reid to the post of minority leader in the next Congress, which begins January 4. And the requisite newspaper, magazine, television, and radio profiles that followed all mentioned Reid’s humble beginnings as the son of an alcoholic miner. His childhood home had no indoor plumbing; his elementary and middle school had two rooms; and his high school education was dependent on whether he could hitchhike each week to school in Henderson, 44 miles north of Searchlight.
These profiles did not escape the senator’s attention. “There’s been a lot written in the past couple of weeks about me and where I come from,” he said at a press conference shortly after he was elected leader. He didn’t sound surprised at this, which makes sense, because the person who talks the most about Harry Reid’s childhood in Searchlight, Nevada, is . . . well, Harry Reid.
Around the same time he was talking to reporters, Sen. Reid’s office sent out a press release with the headline “Reid to Bring Searchlight Values to Leadership Job.” It quoted the senator as saying, “I want every American–from Searchlight to the big cities–to have the same opportunities I had, and more.” And, indeed, he told reporters last week, “I think it’s important here this morning that we talk just one more time about where I come from.” Which he did–at length.
It is no exaggeration to say that Reid has built a mythology around his hometown, which he uses as a metaphor for the American dream. Six years ago, he wrote a book entitled Searchlight: The Camp That Didn’t Fail, which he often reads from during Senate filibusters. And Reid built a house in Searchlight. “Most of the people I know, if they grew up in Searchlight, their big accomplishment is that they managed to get out,” says Steve Sebelius, political columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Not Reid. He constantly goes back to Searchlight. He always flies into Las Vegas, yet he always makes that extra drive.”
Reid made that extra drive a few days before the election, and was at his home in Searchlight when he found out that Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, had lost his seat to Republican John Thune. Reid had been Daschle’s deputy since 1998, and upon hearing news of his boss’s defeat, he sprang into action. At 3A.M., he called Daschle with condolences. At 6 A.M. he started calling his fellow Democratic senators to ask for their support, and by 8 A.M. he had locked up the leadership post. Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, who had toyed with the idea of running for minority leader, didn’t have a chance. Reid’s future was secure.
The Democrats’ isn’t. When Reid becomes minority leader next year, he will speak for only 44 senators, the lowest number of Democrats since the Great Depression. The 2004 election established that the Democrats are now a minority party: They not only lost the presidency; they lost seats in the Senate and the House as well. So the party has entered one of its introspective moods, and, like a brooding teenager, it is torn between self-loathing (“The leadership of our party has a cultural disconnect,” says Kerry adviser Doug Sosnick) and paranoid fantasies (“The Accuracy of the Voting Results Are Questioned–and Should Be,” reads a headline from the lefty website Buzzflash.net).
Maybe Reid can lead the party out of its funk. A canny behind-the-scenes operator, he is also a moderate –some say a conservative. For one thing, Reid’s record on abortion is more, um, nuanced than most Democrats’. It’s true that he supports U.N. efforts at population control, opposes the ban on funding for overseas abortions, and, before a bill’s final passage, often votes for amendments that would weaken that bill’s pro-life measures. But he’s also voted for bans on partial-birth abortion. He’s voted for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, or Laci and Conner’s Law. He’s voted against resolutions in support of Roe v. Wade.
And there’s more. Reid is against gun control. He cosponsored a Senate bill shielding gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and he opposed the assault-weapons ban. And, though he opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, he’s twice supported Nevada’s statewide ban on same-sex marriage. Also, he cosponsored a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Prominently displayed on his website is a picture of him shaking hands with Ronald Reagan. He voted for the 1991 Gulf War, for the second Iraq war, for the $87 billion earmarked for Iraqi and Afghan reconstruction. He is a convert to Mormonism who is passionate about his faith. And he’s a teetotaler.
On things like taxes, affirmative action, and the environment, Reid is more of a mainstream Democrat. But look at him closely, and it is clear that Reid has more in common with Joe Lieberman than with Nancy Pelosi. The problem is that, unfortunately for Reid, one of the things he shares with Lieberman is a soporific public persona. Reid’s voice is quiet and his appearance plain. He blends easily into the crowd; he might be taken for the man in the gray flannel suit’s shorter, quieter second cousin.
Joe McCullough, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who has known Reid for 20 years, puts it more charitably: “Harry’s not charismatic, but he comes across as being extremely genuine. He’s soft-spoken. He’s not going to be like Daschle.” Others are less charitable. Sebelius, the political columnist, says Reid is “as dry as the martinis he never drinks.” And the liberal columnist Molly Ivins wrote recently that Reid is “charismatically challenged.”
The senator himself is aware of this. Shortly after Election Day, he appeared at a photo-opportunity with Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry. The three waved and smiled for the cameras. Then Reid told a story.
“I talked to Senator Byrd today,” he said lightheartedly. “He said he got some paper in Nevada calling. He says, ‘I’m going to say nice things about you.’ But, he says, ‘If they ask me, I’m going to tell them we have one complaint about you.’
“I said, ‘What is that, Robert?’
“He says, ‘He never talks loud enough.'”
Still, those who have watched Reid the longest insist that beneath the colorless demeanor is a calculating, savvy mind, and a knowledgeable, talented partisan. “They probably have to turn his mike up to hear what he’s saying,” says Sebelius, “but what he’s saying is worth listening to.”
Once the mike is turned up, of course, you are bound to hear something about Searchlight, Nevada. Like this, from Reid’s speech to the Democratic National Convention last July: “On the wall of our home in Searchlight, my mother hung a blue pillowcase with yellow fringe and stitching of a quote by President Roosevelt,” Reid told the crowd, explaining how he came to be a Democrat. “I can still see his words on the wall of our home: We can. We will. We must.”
A lot has happened since the Boston convention. What Reid didn’t know at the time was that, on Election Day, President Bush would carry Searchlight, Nevada, by 87 votes. Doesn’t sound like much. But then, when only 423 people show up at the polls, 87 votes make for a margin of 20 points. George W. Bush won Searchlight in a landslide.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
