In the aftermath of the 2000 election, I hung up from an interview with Harry Reid to immediately find his press spokesman -- who had been on the call -- calling back frantically to spin something Reid had said about Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Needless to say, what Reid had to say about Harris had not been kind. But there was no doubt that it was what he believed. The remark was so blunt, without being profane, that I found myself laughing at the sudden outburst of candor.
Reid was not the majority leader then; he flew below the radar. He was the fire to Tom Daschle's ice. But his candor has not gone away, and in the wake of his declaring the war in Iraq lost, the question of the hour among pundits and political observers is whether this bluntness is a force for good or ill.
A disapproving David S. Broder in today's Washington Post compared Reid's controversial utterances to Alberto Gonzales' incompetence. "Here's a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats -- a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance," writes Broder. "If you answered, 'Harry Reid,' give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end."
Ouch! But Broder's off the mark, making the classic mistake of inexact parallels. Both men are in trouble, but for different reasons -- in fact, for exactly opposite reasons. One is suspected of not telling the full truth to the Senate, and the other may be guilty of telling too much of it to the country.
Harry Reid's calling the war "lost" has exposed him to predictably harsh criticism from the White House and has produced some nervousness among people, particularly Democrats, squeamish about how talk in Washington affects the men and women fighting the war. To be sure, there are all sorts of logical ways for one to come to the conclusion that the war is a failure -- that it is un-winnable and thus lost. But to admit failure in the way Reid did is antithetical to the ways of Washington, and thus a political price may need to be paid.
Reid may eventually be forced to apologize. And as evidence of the majority leader's "ineptitude," Broder cites previous comments for which he has had to say he's sorry: He called Alan Greenspan a hack, questioned Bill Frist's commitment to the Senate, and at a high school in Nevada in May, 2005, called the president a loser. "The man's father is a wonderful human being," Reid told the students, "I think this guy is a loser." Unkind, indecorous? Yes. Inept? You make the call -- but the language is accessible enough to signal a man telling the truth from the depths of his being.
Indeed, let us ponder this "ineptitude" charge a bit further, as it's come up before in discussion of Reid by elite commentators. Reid led the Democrats back to control of the Senate against very long odds in November. This week, he passed an Iraq war spending bill with withdrawal timetables -- passage that depended on Russ Feingold and Ben Nelson voting the same way. That was a Wedding at Cana kind of moment. Would that more ineptitude came in this variety.
Reid, the former boxer and a mob prosecutor, tends not to talk as if he's been in policy seminars for the last 30 years. His instincts are to hit hard, to go for the knockout. That tendency, combined with the power he now wields given the Democrats' majority control, makes him dangerous to a White House teetering on the edge of oblivion as well as to those easily ruffled by violations of decorum. Hence the heavy pushback in recent days.
The real question is whether the obvious discomfort of some Democrats currently high-stepping in hopes of getting past Reid's remark is particularly warranted. (In this context it may be useful to recall the popular furor that failed to materialize over Barack Obama's recent "wasted" lives comment, despite war supporters' best efforts.) It just might be that the American people already know what they believe on Iraq -- and are much closer to Reid's position than the White House's. As Reid put it after uttering the remark last week, "Now, I said this is how I feel." His saving grace may be that those sentiments put him squarely in the American mainstream.
In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 66 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and headed in the wrong direction. And if there was any doubt about whether people had Iraq in mind with that answer, the exact same percentage -- a full two-thirds of Americans -- disapprove of the president's handling of the situation in Iraq, more than the 60 percent who disapprove of his performance generally. Meanwhile, 55 percent in the same poll say that the war is unwinnable.
Because of what they perceive as his failure in fighting the war, the president has lost the American people. Truth be told, in terms of ineptitude, Harry Reid may be fighting out of his weight class.
