Reid struggles against bad economy, GOP rival
David EspoOn the day early voting opened in the nation's most closely watched Senate race, Majority Leader Harry Reid campaigned from union hall to Hispanic neighborhood to NAACP dinner to Asian barbecue, imploring supporters at each stop to propel him to a fast start.
His Republican rival, tea party favorite Sharron Angle, had no public appearances during the day, and Reid, soft-spoken and slashing at the same time, said he knew why.
"How can I say this and be kind," he said. "If I had those stands, and I'm doing away with Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Education, privatizing the Veterans Administration, I would stay out of the public, too."
Yet like incumbent Democrats everywhere — and more than most — it's not only a Republican rival that Reid is combatting. It's the economy, in the state with the nation's highest rates of unemployment (14.4 percent) and home foreclosures, where the Las Vegas strip glitters a block or two away from the gloom of shuttered businesses.
The polls make the race a toss-up, spending on televised attack ads stand at a multimillion-dollar crescendo and not even Reid's own partisans argue with conviction that he won the only debate that Angle would accept.
"Man up, Harry Reid," the 61-year-old former state lawmaker said in the most memorable moment of their hour together on stage, urging him to concede that Social Security faces a financial crisis that threatens its survival and must be changed.
Two days later, Reid's Saturday excursion into interest group politics marked the beginning of the final phase of a campaign he began planning nearly two years ago.
A veteran of 40 years in politics, he lost his first race for the Senate and survived a re-election scare in 1998 by fewer than 500 votes.
Now, Reid is sometimes described as lucky for having drawn Angle as a rival. But unlike so much else in Nevada, luck had relatively little to do with it.
In one of the oddest political pairings of the year, tea party supporters, Reid, the state Democratic Party and an independent group led by a long ago aide to the majority leader all worked to defeat Sue Lowden, the pre-primary favorite of the Republican establishment.
Angle triumphed, and now Reid relies on a two-part strategy.
He boasts that by his own actions, he has created more than 50,000 construction and casino jobs in his state in the depths of the recession.
At the same time, he hopes her conservative positions on Social Security, Medicare and more will make it easier for voters to look past their own economic woes and return him to the Senate. Over the course of the debate he called her ideas "extreme" five times.
During the primary, Angle said, "we need to phase Medicare and Social Security out." She favors private accounts for younger workers, and her website now says everyone who has been pledged benefits should "receive every dime they ever put in," leaving open the question of whether their promised monthly checks should be cut.
Given her Democratic opponent, Angle's primary victory guaranteed her national attention. She raised a staggering $14 million in campaign donations for the three months ending Sept. 30, and independent organizations have spent more than $4 million on ads either for her or against Reid.
Outside groups have spent about $1.5 million for Reid or against Angle.
In addition, Reid has been on the attack since the day after he helped nominate her, while Angle's campaign had to be rebuilt from the ground up with the help of Republican Party officials in Washington.
Like a number of other surprise Republican primary winners this year, she scrubbed her website of some of her more controversial positions, and largely stayed out of public view after the victory.
But unlike most others, she's stayed there, part of what some Republicans privately concede is a bid to reduce impolitic utterances.
On Friday, she spoke without prior public notice to a group of Hispanic school children. Inevitably parts were recorded on a handheld device, and she is heard deflecting a question about her use of images of dark-skinned men and a map of Mexico to criticize Reid's position on immigration.
"I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials," she said. "I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence."
A few weeks earlier, she met privately with minor party candidate Scott Ashjian, trying to coax him from the race. "I'm not sure you can win and I'm not sure I can win if you're hurting my chance, and that's the part that scares me," she said in a bootleg audio tape.
She also told Ashjian she wants the GOP leadership "to leave me alone," when in fact the National Republican Senatorial Committee has spent several hundred thousand dollars for a get-out-the-vote operation and encouraged donors to contribute to her campaign.
Ashjian remains in the race, and in addition, Nevadans have an option to vote for "none of these candidates," in case they wish to register disapproval for Reid without voting for Angle.
In a race where the contenders agree on little, nothing illustrates the differences between Reid and Angle as much as their views on job creation.
"I believe my number one job is to create jobs as a United States senator," he said in the opening moments of the debate.
She countered a few moments later: "Once again, Harry Reid, it's not your job to create jobs, it's your job to create policies that create the confidence for the private sector to create those jobs."
Reid answers everywhere he goes.
He says that because of one provision he inserted into the economic stimulus legislation, 31,000 jobs were saved at Harrah's. He saved another 22,000 jobs, he says, at a newly completed hotel and casino complex when he called MGM Resorts International's bankers and urged them not to cut off credit before construction was finished.
A just-completed power transmission line that Reid takes credit for was good for 1,000 construction jobs, he adds, and a Las Vegas airport project another 2,000.
"My opponent is against all those jobs I've created. Can you believe that?
Standing before an audience of union workers, many of them retired, Reid came close to suggesting she is crazy.
Stressing the significance of a guaranteed Social Security check, he said "to think that someone wants to take that away from anyone is enough to make you wonder if that person has their faculties."
Her spokesman later replied that "Harry is desperate and he's resorted to personal attacks because he knows he can't talk about his record. After his debate performance, it's more likely that people are wondering if Harry Reid still has his faculties," said Jarrod Agen.
Angle was out of public view that day, like many. Agen said she spent time telephoning supporters to urge them to vote.
Outside the hall where Reid campaigned, a union-rented bus idled outside, adorned with a banner that read "Early Vote Express." Two dozen or so members of the audience filed on for a trip to the nearest polling place, and the Senate veteran moved on to his next stop.
(This version CORRECTS Corrects that bus was rented by the union, adds full name of MGM Resorts International)