The Last Days of Harry Reid

Harry Reid appears finished. Wishful thinking? Not really. Harry has become deeply unpopular in Nevada. His approval numbers hover around 41%, and 76% think his policies either will not help the state or will actively hurt it. What’s more, early voting has been much heavier in Republican areas than Democratic areas, something unusual. Even his campaign people admit (off the record) that Harry has “maxed out” at 47% in the polls, whereas Angle keeps crossing the 50% line. It’s possible Harry can still turn this around, but it’s looking less and less likely. How did Harry come to this?

Harry began the election season hovering around 41% in the polls against whoever the Republican challenger would be. Then the Republicans chose a wild-card, Sharon Angle, a woman who often said things that were easily characterized to a half-awake electorate as bizarre or crazy. Harry played this up by running a vile smear campaign against Angle, in which he described her as “crazy,” “nuts,” and “an extremist.” He also encouraged the media to dig into everything about her that they could, which they happily did -- fixating on her every word, on her political background, and even on her hair.

While this was going on, Harry’s campaign smartly kept Harry out of sight. That let his approval rating rise and Angle’s fall to the point that they were even around 47%. Harry’s party even set up a fake Tea Party candidate to siphon off Angle’s vote.

But Harry was stuck at 47%, and that meant he needed to campaign. In other words, waiting for Angle to destruct was not going to work, Harry had to make a case for why people should vote for him. That’s when things started to go wrong; indeed, according to a Democratic insider, Harry “underwhelmed.”

First, Harry came across as gray and lawyerly, a deadly combination in politics. Secondly, he was gaffe prone, almost in Biden’s league:

• On tourists: “you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.”

• Describing Barack Obama as being “a light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

• Calling Delaware Senate Candidate Chris Coons “my pet.”

• On Hispanics: “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”

• Describing town-hall participants who were opposed to health care reform as “evil-mongers who use lies, innuendo and rumors.”

• On the economy: “Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.”

• On the effects of Ted Kennedy’s death on health care reform: “I think it’s going to help us.”

• On the Iraq war (in 2007): “This war is lost.”

• To the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “I hope you go out of business.”

• Describing the recently deceased Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd as the greatest living Americans he could name.

Harry also claimed that he has been running the government, before he backtracked and admitted that he was only helping. He also informed us that he saved the world from a depression:

“People have been hurting. And I understand that. And it doesn't give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we'd be in a worldwide depression.”

Third, everything he did started to haunt him. For example, Harry suddenly found himself defending his decision to stay at the Ritz Carlton on the campaign’s dime when his home was only a short distance away. It didn’t help that the Ritz was a campaign contributor. Harry is now trying to explain why one of his aides tried to cover up an illegal seven-year sham marriage to a Lebanese national who was the subject of an Oklahoma City Joint Terror Task Force investigation. Harry has spent days defending his manhood in response to Angle’s suggestion that he “man up” on the issue of Social Security:

"People in Nevada know me from the street to the ring to the Senate chambers. I've never had to prove my manhood to anyone."

That’s sad. Harry even looked foolish when he held a rally with President Obama at a Las Vegas middle school, because all of Obama’s other rallies had been at colleges. . . the implication being that Harry couldn’t fill any venue larger than a middle school auditorium.

But what really killed Harry was his debate with Angle. Harry worked so hard for months to make Angle sound like a lunatic that people expected her to completely bomb in the debate. In fact, he raised her failure expectations so high that anything short of a total meltdown would probably have seemed like a win. Sadly for Harry, she sounded calm, reasonable, and knowledgeable, and that made Harry’s entire campaign up to that point sound like the slur it was.

And like that, she added 3% to her support. . . and growing.

So when Harry returns to whence he came, probably K Street, he should consider that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to paint Angle as a violent, drooling lunatic. But that’s just the tip of this iceberg. Maybe Harry should ask himself how he lost touch with the public? Maybe, living in a lobbyist-fueled cash bubble for so long made him forget that real people don’t like having the government run their health care, don’t like making 15 million illegals into voters to help Democrats, don’t like thuggish unions, don’t like cowards and defeatists running America’s wars, don’t like politicians bribing different parts of the electorate, and don’t like politicians spending this country into bankruptcy to save their banker friends from their own mistakes.

Maybe in his forced-retirement, Harry will finally see the light? Step into the light Harry.


**** Don't forget to pass around the Election Guide to remind people why they need to vote the Democrats out!****