You may remember that when the Senate passed Obamacare last December 24, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s initially cast a “no” vote before changing to “yes.” Everyone laughed at Reid’s misstep and attributed it to the 70-year old Nevada Democrat being exhausted from nonstop work on the health care bill.
Fast forward to Thursday, when the Senate voted on the reconciliation package of “fixes” to its original health bill. The vote was the big one, sending the measure to the House for a final vote and thereby amending some major provisions of Obamacare. And when the roll call came to Reid…he voted “no” again. For a second time on a major health care vote, Reid had to sheepishly change his vote to “yes.”
Here is what he did last December:
And here is what he did Thursday:
All of which leads to the question: No matter how tired Reid was, how could he make precisely the same mistake — voting “no” on his party’s and his president’s top policy initiative — twice in a row? For most observers, the first time could be dismissed as an understandable mistake, but the second seems a bit weird.
Perhaps it’s not so weird when one considers what voting “yes” could cost Reid. A solid majority of people in his home state of Nevada opposes the Democrats’ national health care plan; a Rasmussen poll taken in early March showed that 56 percent of Nevadans opposed the bill, while 41 percent supported it. And Reid devoted the last year to pushing the unpopular measure through Congress.
At the same time, Reid is falling farther behind in his effort to win re-election in November. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Reid trailing two potential Republican challengers — Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian — by 11 points. If Reid loses, his work on behalf of the Obama agenda, and most prominently on national health care, will be the reason. Given that, it’s no surprise that something inside of Reid, exhausted or not, caused him instinctively to vote “no” each time the bill came to a crucial vote. His future depends on it, and only after catching himself — on two separate occasions — did he change his vote to yes.
