And Harry got to pick his opponent!

Imagine your football team is involved in a heated matchup with its greatest rival. Last year, your guys won the championship, but now it's the 2-minute warning, your guys are down by four and they just fumbled.

Wait. You think that's bad? You have no idea how bad things are. Since the first quarter, the team that's whupping your ass with two minutes to play, the one that was in the basement last year, has been playing their fifth-string quarterback. That's right, their first four guys went down in the first quarter.

How embarrassing is that? Most teams don't even have a fifth-string quarterback. By that point, the coach is asking some defensive back, "Hey, Grubnik, you played behind center in high school, right? How many plays you remember?"

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the most powerful legislator in Washington -- though his role as facilitator of the Obama-Pelosi-Schumer socialist agenda has not exactly won him any popularity contests back here in sagebrush country -- didn't want to have to face then-Republican Attorney General Brian Sandoval in his re-election bid this year, so he nominated Sandoval to a lifetime seat on the federal bench in 2005.

Sandoval quit the bench in 2009, but the senior Reid dodged the first bullet: Judge Sandoval opted to unseat the awkward governor of his own party, Jim Gibbons, and is now laying his own 16-point whupping on a younger Reid, Harry's son Rory, in Nevada's gubernatorial general election.

The next likely challenger was reasonably popular Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki. So Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, daughter of longtime Las Vegas tourism czar Manny Cortez and always a willing Democratic Party foot soldier, indicted Krolicki, alleging he mishandled funds while he served as state treasurer. The indictment was so baseless it was thrown out of court last year on a motion to dismiss -- which hardly ever happens. But by then it was too late for Krolicki to take on Reid. Two down.

The other member of the GOP "top three" potential Reid challengers was articulate and debonair Northern Nevada Rep. Dean Heller. Someone else will have to explain why he demurred, though he's young and may figure the smaller-government tidal wave will only grow stronger as "multicultural" socialism, along with its various economic and environmental frauds, continues to crash and burn world-wide.

The GOP fourth choice? Attractive and wealthy former state Sen. Sue Lowden was considered the front-runner last spring. Though she's no policy wonk, there was little to dislike about Ms. Lowden. Yes, she and her husband own casinos, but this is Nevada. She was a reasonably articulate conservative during her brief tenure in Carson City, until the public employee unions took her out with their usual scurrilous lies -- her vote to let parents decide which shots their kids should get meant she was "in favor of childhood disease," thoughtful stuff like that.

So Harry loaded up against former TV newsgal Sue Lowden in this spring's GOP primary, and ... got his wish! Lowden lost! Harry got to run against the GOP's fifth-stringer, surging out-of-nowhere former Assemblywoman and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle!

The same Angle who, in the campaign's only televised debate, turned out to be sharper than Harry, more attractive and likeable than Harry, who was already beating Harry by 3 percentage points before he made a fool of himself on TV rambling about NFL players wearing pink helmets, and who now has him down by 4, on the final-week disclosure that a (now "former") $50,000-a-year Reid staffer lied to federal agents to cover up a fake marriage to help an illegal alien from fatwah-land stay in this country!

Did I mention Reid favors amnesty for illegal aliens, a position about as popular in Nevada as an 8 p.m. curfew?

I don't care who wins Tuesday -- though it looks like Angle from where I'm sitting, barring massive fraud. The Democrats have huge problems, regardless, and they're called the SEIU, AFSCME, and most of all Barack Obama and his big-spending, big-borrowing, business-hating socialist agenda, which has single-handedly dumped us on the verge of the Second Great Depression.

(Wait till you see what happens when the dollar collapses.)

Yes, Democrats will retain plenty of safe, gerrymandered seats. But on Tuesday night, the map of America's contested elections is going to look mighty red, with islands of blue in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts; in California, Oregon and Hawaii.

(And if you think Democrats have good tax and economic policies, please move to one of those "thriving" states immediately and try to open a business.)

Democrats' best hope is to at least hold Patty Murray's Senate seat in Washington -- if she can stay close, Democratic lawyers and judges will steal it back for her.

The big question now is whether the "moderate" RINOs will be able to take these new Tea Party freshmen aside, come January, and explain, "You have to understand how things work, here. If you don't want to be a one-term wonder, you have to bring home the pork. And the way to get your earmarks approved is to agree to vote for everybody else's earmarks ..."

But here's the real irony. That might have worked with Brian Sandoval or Brian Krolicki. But it won't work with Sharron Angle. She believes in sharply limited government.

"Go ahead, commit political suicide. Nominate 'principled' Tea Party conservatives who won't compromise," the Democrats dared the GOP last spring. "Nyah nyah nyah." So what are they going to say now, as the map runs red Tuesday night? "They don't have a mandate to do anything radical"?

They do. And the people who gave them that mandate were hysterical, fear-mongering Harry Reid and his Democrats, ominously warning one and all: "They believe in the U.S. Constitution. Disallows most of what we've been doing for years. Pretty scary. Pretty extreme."

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Small government advocates should strongly consider voting for Libertarians Ed Klapproth (http://donatetoklapproth.com/) or Joe Silvestri for Congress, and Art Lampitt for governor.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and the author of "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.