Sunday, November 07, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Sen. Harry Reid, minority leader

But how far to the left will new post require him to tilt?

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid handily won re-election Tuesday over a challenger most political insiders considered a one-issue no-name: anti-gay-marriage activist Richard Ziser.

Sen. Reid will now almost certainly find himself minority leader of the upper house in Washington, following the defeat of Sen. Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, in Tuesday's nationwide Republican sweep. (Sen. Reid, currently Sen. Daschle's assistant minority leader, has a clear path to the leadership post. A challenge from telegenic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut has gone by the wayside.)

Nevada gains some muscle in Washington through Sen. Reid's steady climb through the leadership ranks, of course. But there's another lesson in Sen. Daschle's defeat that our own senior senator ignores at his peril.

Observers in South Dakota report Tom Daschle lost his seat to upstart Republican Rep. John Thune after serving more than two decades in Congress because his constituents found him to be living two lives.

On his occasional trips home, Sen. Daschle tried to present himself as a South Dakota country boy, in touch with that state's essentially conservative, rural values.

But in Washington, Tom Daschle was quite a different creature. A pal and close ally of Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, he led the modern Democratic Party's frenetically obstructionist far-left agenda, aimed at crippling American productivity and energy independence through extreme workplace and environmental regulations; pushing an anti-marriage, nanny-state social agenda; and maneuvering to block a Republican president from doing his constitutionally designated duty -- appointing qualified judges who will place our Constitution (with its firm limits on central government power) above whatever aberrant hiring quotas and destructive welfare schemes may find favor these days in Boston, Santa Monica and New York City.

Tuesday, this Jekyll-and-Hyde act finally reached the end of its string in South Dakota.

Can Sen. Reid think of anyone else who teams with the New York and California Democratic delegations in Washington to play obstructionist hardball -- refusing to "move to the center" in response to the express will of the electorate -- but who journeys home to a traditionally conservative rural state every six years to don a pair of new-bought bluejeans, sit on a hay bale and pose for television ads in which he contends he's "just a down-home country boy"?

Sen. Reid has done many fine things for Nevada. But his electoral base lies in only two of Nevada's 17 counties, and he won his last serious race by fewer than 500 votes. And next time he may not luck out and find himself facing an underfunded, little-known opponent.

If his new leadership position requires him to carry the banner of the far left, becoming minority leader may very well be a career-ender for Sen. Harry Reid.