Battle weary Battle Born State gets a Senate race for the ages

Happy birthday, Nevada, you Rodney Dangerfield of states.

Battle Born, you're battle weary. The calendar says you're 146 years old, but I can't lie to you. You don't look a day over 173. From high unemployment to the mortgage foreclosure crisis, you've seen better decades.

Question is, how do you finally get a little respect?

On Tuesday, your angry and frustrated people will go to the polls to vote in the race of the year between U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican challenger Sharron Angle. The latest statewide survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which shows Angle leading Reid 49 percent to 45 percent, points to a dramatic shift in political direction.

I have no doubt both candidates love Nevada, but they express their affection in very different ways. For his part, Reid can gush about his home state at the drop of a Battle Born-themed news release.

"Many Nevadans are in the heart of important battles right now -- battling foreclosure, battling a job market that is growing too slowly and battling those who would eliminate Social Security," he said in a statement. "Nevadans are fighters -- they always have been, since the first pioneers settled the desert landscape and the rising Sierra Nevada. I will stand with Nevada's working families as they battle for secure, permanent jobs that can't be outsourced, for lower taxes, and a strong, clean energy economy."

Reid has shown the love this year by playing Santa Claus with a federal credit card. He's unloaded presents in county after county. His green-energy push has fast-tracked a transmission line to link the state and make it possible to harvest solar, wind and geothermal power. His senatorial hammerlock has the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project down for the count.

If you hate pork, of course, then Reid's not your man. If you think green energy is a boondoggle, his vision is a sham. If you want Yucca for the jobs it will bring, he stands in the way.

It's a dead certainty that if Reid is bounced into retirement many of those projects will vanish with him. There's no such thing as the Great Washington Fairness Committee. Garnering one federal program and blocking another happens only through the relentless exercise of clout, muscle and horse-trading at the highest levels. It's hard for me to imagine this reality shocks the sensibilities of any thinking adult.

But that argument hasn't impressed a large percentage of voters, who perceive Reid as a guy who's strayed too far from home on his way to the top of the U.S. political system. It doesn't help to have 14.4 percent unemployment, the housing market in the dumper and bankruptcies piling high.

His critics ask, "If this is what all that power gets us, who needs it?"

Reid has spent most of the campaign arguing a negative -- that without his lofty position in Washington and proximity to President Barack Obama, Nevada's predicament would be much worse -- but he's failed to convince a skeptical citizenry.

Meanwhile, my attempt to reach the media-shunning Angle to solicit Nevada platitudes was unsuccessful. Her obsessive sprinting from the media spotlight is juxtaposed with her energetic courting of a seat in one of the most exclusive U.S. political clubs. Still, I don't doubt she believes she has the answers to our ailments.

Angle, the Tea Party revolutionary with the national GOP backing, sees a future where Nevadans are free from federal intrusion. Her Nevada is a place without the hunger for federal programs, one that flourishes with a smaller federal tax burden and less regulation.

Angle and Reid are proud Nevadans with diametrically opposed views.

No matter who prevails Tuesday, Nevada will survive. It always does.

Whether it finally gets a little respect is something else.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.