Can a teetotaling Mormon from
a busted mining town in Nevada lead Democrats to the Promised Land
of national power? This much is certain: Democrats rallied behind
Harry Reid in the hope that he can take them through purgatory
—or is it hell? — as minority leader of the 44-member
Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate.
Many doubted at
first that a man with his mild demeanor had the right stuff to
represent underdog Democrats at their nadir. I think Reid has what
it takes.
First, he is an insider, known as one of the
best players in the inside baseball game of the Senate, where deals
are made in the cloakroom and not on the floor. This means Reid
will help shape the issues that shape the future of Democrats.
Second, Reid’s highest personal ambition is winning
back the Senate for the Democrats and then becoming majority
leader. This means he will cultivate and advance new leaders for
the party.
Finally — and as important as the others
but little noticed in the national puzzlement over how Reid got
where he is — he understands the West. Nov.2 indicates that
the key to the Democratic Party’s future nationally is in the
West. The signs are hopeful. Western Democrats did surprisingly
well, even though the states went for Bush.
How did Reid
end up in charge of a party most see as coastal and liberal? His
hard-luck biography says a lot. His father, a prospector and miner
in Searchlight, Nev., committed suicide when Reid was a young man.
To get a better education, Reid hitchhiked 40 miles each week to go
to high school in Henderson, near Las Vegas.
After
college, he worked his way through law school as a Capitol Hill cop
in Washington, D.C. Back in Nevada, he became head of the state
gaming commission and took on the mob in the casino industry. Reid
is not a big man, but he was a boxer in high school, a scrapper who
puts up a good fight.
Reid grew up in a backwater of the
old West but came of age politically in a new West. The region was
transformed after World War II by military spending, the interstate
highway system, the rise of tourism and the growth of its
metropolitan cities. Those forces came together to make this the
fastest-growing region in the country.
Las Vegas, where
Reid focused his political career, has been caught up in this
maelstrom of change. But Reid has also had to represent the rest of
Nevada as well, the mining towns, ranches and farms and Indian
reservations. He has learned to make important compromises on
mining, water, grazing, wilderness, and with Native American
tribes. What is most interesting about his compromises is that they
are not haphazard. They flow out of his vision of the future.
Reid in his speeches and in personal interactions tells
one story over and over. In it, he is taking his wife to see a
spring hidden among the Joshua trees in the desert west of
Searchlight, where he went as a boy to escape his life. They find
the spring, but it has been trashed. Reid is heartbroken: It is one
beautiful thing from his past that he wanted to share with his wife
in the present. This is one of the few personal stories you will
hear from this reticent man. The other involves the suicide of his
father, which he only recently began to talk about.
What
do the stories signify? They tell him and his listeners that the
old ways have got to change. Those stories drive him to find a way
out of the dead-end dilemma of the old West, which sees compromise
as unmanly.
What might Reid’s leadership of the
Senate minority mean for the West? He will do everything possible
to stop the proposed nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles
northwest of Las Vegas. And if the Senate minority leader can do
one thing, it is to clog up the system and delay action. Unlike the
House of Representatives, the majority in the Senate cannot ride
roughshod over the minority.
More important for the
nation, Reid will also be able to shape the legislative agenda
behind the scenes. If he can shape the Democratic agenda, he might
succeed in moving the party toward the center and toward the West.
Reid could be the instrument by which the West replaces the South
as a key part of a Democratic coalition, which once again makes
that party a contender.
Jon Christensen is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He spent 12 years as journalist
in Nevada and is currently on a graduate fellowship in history at
Stanford University in California.
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