Defiance
Inside the final days of the election Harry Reid couldn't win
By Mark Warren
Published in the January 2011 issue, on sale now.
He looks very tired.
On the last full day of his last campaign, all the asking and arguing is done, and now he's just exhausted. An aide will come in soon and press him to please go back to his room at the Vdara and just rest. He says he will, he will, as soon as he's finished here. He has some idea that maybe he'll catch game five of the Series down in Texas. He's pretty rabid for baseball, grew up a big Indians fan, and the Cardinals, too — glued to the radio down in Searchlight, Nevada, his only portal to the outside world — but he'll root for just about anybody as long as it's not the Yankees. He hates the damn Yankees. Rooting for them is like rooting for the fat cats to beat the little guys, which makes no sense whatsoever, if you ask him. So yeah, baseball, maybe later, back at the Vdara.
But Harry Reid's not going anywhere just yet, and here he sits parked on the phone in his headquarters, a warren of plain rooms in a featureless Vegas neighborhood of office parks showing FOR LEASE signs most every block. He yawns. He's impeccably dressed — high collar, perfect knot, charcoal-gray suit with a chalk stripe. Yawns again. Behind his glasses, his eyes, which he never seems to fully open, look like sanded marbles. Light-purple bags underneath. When he was a kid in high school, he had to work for his living, and he'd keep going on such little sleep that on the night shift at the bakery, he taught himself to sleep standing up. On the campaign he hasn't been sleeping much at all, and he says with a dry laugh that he hasn't been dealing with the stress of this campaign "as well as you might think." Back in 1998, when he ran a terribly dysfunctional campaign and pulled out his reelection over John Ensign by just 428 votes after a month of lawsuits and missing ballots and psychic torture, Reid took up yoga. He says it's not so hard to do, you just have to sweat a lot in a hot room. But lately he hasn't had time for yoga or much else. And he's in another race that's just a killer, and what's worse, his opponent this time is crazy. The only real difference between '98 and now is that no one expected him to lose in '98, and no one expects him to win now. No one.
But it is disregard like this that has always propelled him. Back when he was in law school at George Washington and working full-time as a Capitol Hill cop, and Landra was pregnant with their second and his car died and the schedule was killing him, Reid went to one of the deans of the law school — fellow named Potts — to plead his case and ask for some financial assistance. And Potts came back at him with "Mr. Reid, maybe the law is not for you. Why don't you just quit?" Instead, Reid doubled his course load, finished law school early, and vowed to leave that miserable town and never go back. So he's got more than a little chip on his shoulder.
Now everybody says that he is about to be swallowed by history, served up like a sacrifice. Many in the press say he ought to just capitulate to the power of this narrative and are actually impatient with Reid's noncooperation in the face of a tidal wave. Guy doesn't seem to understand. Could be because the paper in Vegas seems to hate him so much; it's enough to make one jaundiced by media narratives. "For the past eighteen months, they wrote two editorials a week against me," Reid says. "One Sunday, they ran five pieces of negative stuff plus a cartoon against me. As a journalist, that would have made Mike terribly upset."
more...
http://www.esquire.com/features/harry-reid-election-0111
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