This Town (9 page)

When wandering alone, Reid will sometimes break into a slight grin, as if he has just told himself a joke. Reid reminds me sometimes of a child—a peculiar child who has an imaginary friend who he speaks to unfiltered when he is alone, or not alone. Reid was once being wired up for a television interview in Las Vegas and was overcome by the need to tell the technician fastening his microphone that he had “terrible breath.” When an aide asked Reid later why he would possibly say such a thing, Reid calmly explained that it was true.

He has a heightened sense of smell. He once complained about the body odor of summer tourists trekking through the Capitol, taking the occasion of a dedication ceremony for a new Capitol visitor center to make his annoyance public. “In the summertime,” he said, “because of the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.”

He is also surprisingly food- and body-obsessed, more evocative of a teenage girl than an earthy old boxer. He will occasionally partake of yoga (in black Lycra stretch pants) with Landra in their Ritz-Carlton apartment. He can be harshly judgmental of fat people and other ill-conditioned creatures. When George W. Bush invited Reid to the Oval Office for coffee as a gesture of goodwill at the end of his presidency, Reid promptly insulted the president’s dog, Barney, who had trotted into their meeting. “Your dog is fat,” Reid told the president.

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R
eid often invokes the desert blotch of Searchlight to explain his unfiltered style. He talks interminably about his hometown, even for a member of Congress. Washington politicians love talking about their hometowns, especially when running for reelection. They swoon over how the storied villages embody all that is great about America and how Washington could learn much from the town’s good values. (This is usually around the time their spouse gets an even bigger lobbying job and they buy a new mansion in McLean, Virginia, where they will live out their days.) The hometown can be an especially useful prop if it provides a tableau of personal adversity to overcome. Bonus points if the town name is an evocative noun, like Hope, Arkansas, or Plains, Georgia, or Searchlight.

But Searchlight is especially rich in this regard. Gold was discovered there in 1897, and there have been few highlights since. “The boom peaked in 1907 and quickly faded along with the town,” it says on a plaque in front of the Harry Reid Elementary School. Reid says he plans to be buried in a Searchlight graveyard, next to Landra.

Reid is a master of “that practiced, pale-faced-bumpkin-from-Searchlight act,” says Las Vegas political guru Jon Ralston. This masks a savvy, rough-hewn politician whom Ralston describes as “ruthless” and “Machiavellian.” Still, Reid clearly loves Searchlight, and his hard-bitten story is legitimate. The third of four brothers, Reid grew up in a wooden shack with no hot water or indoor toilet or trees. Only rocks. He tells of leafing through the Sears catalogue, just to browse the items they could never afford at Christmas, and then ripping out pages to deploy later as toilet paper in the outhouse.

“I look at these pictures, I cannot believe how I lived,” Reid told me. He compares the Searchlight of his boyhood to “that place in West Virginia.” There’s a word he’s looking for. Hmm. “You know, where things are so bad? Poor?”

“Appalachia?” I said.

“Yes, Appalachia,” Reid said, and then broke into a curiously big laugh.

Harry Sr. was a hard-rock miner who suffered chronic pain from on-the-job injuries. He battled alcoholism and depression, and spent time in jail. He killed himself in 1972, at fifty-eight. The senator’s mother, Inez Reid, was a redhead with few and eventually no teeth. As a teenager, Harry took a job at a gas station and bought her a false set. “It changed her,” Reid says of his mother’s new teeth. “I mean, you can imagine how good she felt with teeth after all those years.”

When I asked him if it’s ever painful to recall his own youth, Reid shrugs. “The only thing I don’t like is to watch movies about suicide and stuff like that,” Reid says, as close as he comes to publicly contemplating his inner life. But he is capable of pointed moments of empathy. Once, a young communications adviser, Rebecca Kirszner, who had just started working in Reid’s Senate office, kept misreading a phone number that Reid had been trying to dial for a radio interview. In his straight-to-the-point manner, Reid asked her, “Do you have a learning disability?” Embarrassed, she quietly said yes. Reid looked Kirszner in the eye and said, “You must have worked twice as hard to have gotten where you are.” No one had ever said this before to Kirszner, who was taken aback, and moved. “I did,” she whispered.

Reid’s sense of Washington psychology is grounded heavily in seeing—and, in certain cases, exploiting—the past humiliations of others. As with many politicians who grew up in poverty and endured family turmoil and other adversities, Washington has also been a powerful reinvention canvas for Reid. The city is filled with proving grounds that double as sanctuaries, like the Senate floor.

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S
ometimes during intense legislative debate and machinations, I sit up in the gallery and watch the floor. No words from below can be deciphered, only the low rumble and occasional laugh echoing up, and a pageant of body language. Senators are constantly engaged in physical contact, particularly the men shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, and bro hugging. It is the ritual power dance of faux fellowship, Capitol version. Michael Maccoby, a Washington psychoanalyst and author of the management and business book
Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails
, says he is struck by the “homoeroticism of politics.” Not homosexuality per se, but just an abiding sense of love on the Capitol floor, even among adversaries. “There is a sense of people cherishing being together, even at a time when camaraderie supposedly no longer exists,” Maccoby says.

Maccoby speaks of a “pseudo love” that people in politics can derive from the approval of their patrons, the loyalty of their staffs and supporters, and the reflective glory of their marquee friends. Multibillion-dollar industries have been born to foster pseudo love through image-buffing public relations, lobbying, advertising, or political campaigns.

“Washington is both a secretive and intensely scrutinized place and it can breed paranoia,” Maccoby says. It relies on a form of total loyalty that is at once widely available and fleeting in D.C. It self-selects a personality type that gravitates to the high-wire act of the public affirmation game. The floors of Congress provide case studies.

Harry Reid is always careening across the Senate floor. “I always feel like I’m missing something if I’m not there,” Reid says. In his memoir,
The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington
,
Reid writes about how his father was never as happy as when he was down in his workplace, the gold mines. It didn’t matter that the work was sporadic and backbreaking and that the pay was awful. “I truly believe that it was one of the few places he was comfortable in this world,” Reid wrote.

Harry Reid feels similarly about mining votes on the Senate floor. The early Obama years were a bitch. Reid faced a tough reelection race in 2010 in a state where he was hardly loved to begin with. And this was before he engineered passage of an unpopular health-care bill and Republicans had made him their fattest electoral bull’s-eye in the country.
Reid’s unfavorable rating in Nevada had risen to 52 percent by the end of 2009. “
Reid fatigue,” diagnosed Ralston, the Nevada political couch doctor.

Reid stopped sleeping during the health-care debates of 2009 and early 2010. His caucus was getting harassed at town meetings by a newfangled phenomenon called the Tea Party. The White House kept wanting to know why the deliberations were taking so long. It was becoming clear that Reid was going to have to keep sixty Democratic senators in line to pass a bill; many of them were unreliable, some of them were double-dealers, and two of them were on death’s door. When then ninety-two-year-old Robert Byrd of West Virginia was hospitalized, Reid spoke to the state’s Democratic governor, Joe Manchin III, about replacing Byrd quickly “
in the event that he could not carry out his duties.” Before Ted Kennedy died in August, Reid made calls to Massachusetts’s Democratic governor Deval Patrick and state lawmakers urging them to change a state law mandating that the seat stay vacant until a special election was held a few months later; this could cost Democrats a decisive vote. The law was changed and Patrick named Paul G. Kirk Jr. as interim senator.

Until that special election, Reid had become preoccupied with the most basic of political duties: survival—literally, in the case of Byrd, the longest-tenured senator in history. Could the nonagenarian West Virginian hang on long enough—and remain ambulatory enough—to vote for the bill? Byrd’s looming expiration date became an ever-present subtext. It was too delicate to reference in public, except when Republican Tom Coburn declared in a floor speech that “what the American people ought to pray for is that somebody can’t make the vote.” Coburn said he was referring to a snowstorm that had been predicted for D.C., but many people assumed he was talking about Byrd.

Coburn later clarified through a spokesman that he does not wish misfortune on anyone, but you wonder if he might not wish just a little on Harry Reid.

•   •   •

H
e hung up on me again,” Coburn was saying, dumbstruck, to an aide after Reid curtly ended another phone call. It’s not clear what this particular call was about, only that Coburn had initiated it and Reid had ended it.

Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, might have been calling to complain that Reid’s office had issued a statement accusing Coburn of not caring about kids eating lethally unsafe food. Or maybe this call was about how Reid might have accused Coburn of being a racist because Coburn wanted to offset funding for the Justice Department to investigate hate crimes. Whatever: he did not take kindly to Reid saying whatever he said, so he called Reid to say so, and Reid hung up, and this cycle tends to repeat periodically between the two men.

For what it’s worth, Reid says he is trying to get better about ending his phone calls with the proper sign-off but allows that it might be futile. (“I can’t do it,” he says, “because I have nothing more to say.”)

Also, for what it’s worth, Coburn does not care what Reid or anyone else thinks of him. Known as “Dr. No,” Coburn, a family practice physician, has built a Washington reputation on displeasing the constituencies politicians spend most of their time trying to please: special-interest groups, local entities looking for funding, party leaders, Republican activists, and often his colleagues, or the ones who call him arrogant and sanctimonious and “Dr. I Know Better.” Coburn doesn’t care. “Caring” is a Coburn market inefficiency.

Coburn looks like he has a headache. He has intense squinty eyes under small wire-rimmed glasses and a face cast in a slight grimace. The front of his white-gray hair bristles up like a porcupine’s quills. Like Reid, with whom he is oddly of a piece, Coburn is content to let the noise and fury of modern politics roll off him, or at least he pretends to be oblivious.

Coburn’s “disappointment” with his colleagues is palpable. He insists they’re “wonderful people,” albeit clueless and cowardly. He has prescribed a “spinal transplant” for 70 percent of the chamber. Or, moving down the body, he has diagnosed his colleagues as having “reproductive organs the size of BBs” and to be generally lacking in “gonads.”

But Coburn’s bond with Reid—“my friend from Nevada,” as they say in the formal bullshit of the Senate—is special. In keeping with the gentleman’s-club protocol of The Club, Coburn and Reid have described their relationship as “cordial”—“cordial” being the bare minimum salute and Washington dog whistle for obvious hatred.

(Here is an example of how two senators with a “cordial” relationship deal with each other: In 2005, when Rick Santorum was still in the Senate,
I wrote a profile of the brash Pennsylvania Republican, who had managed to claw his way into his party’s leadership despite being disliked by many of his colleagues. Santorum’s unpopularity was common knowledge on Capitol Hill. As a reporter, however, getting a senator to disparage a colleague on the record can be next to impossible, given protocol against even the mildest slander of fellow members. I tried. And I turned up the predictably limp platitudes from senators who plainly could not stand Santorum—which is “Latin for asshole,” as Democrat Bob Kerrey of Nebraska once helpfully translated. Finally, I encountered Democrat Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, just off the Senate floor. As she walked by, I asked her, “What do you think of Rick Santorum?” To which Landrieu grimaced and replied, “You couldn’t quote what I’d have to say about him.” That was good enough for me. I quoted Landrieu saying that. And sure enough, next time they were on the floor together, Santorum made a beeline for Landrieu, saying in so many words that his feelings were hurt. In turn, Landrieu did what most self-respecting lawmakers do when cornered about saying something objectionable: she blamed her staff; specifically, she blamed her communications director, Adam Sharp, who by any reading of the situation had nothing to do with it. But Landrieu reamed him out anyway and demanded he craft a letter of apology to Santorum. He did; Landrieu reviewed it and then refused to sign it herself, apparently not wishing to authenticate this travesty with her pristine signature. The office autopen had to suffice.)

Between fistfuls of Hot Tamales in his Senate office, Coburn paralleled for me the two places where Reid has lived and thrived, the exotically American cities of D.C. and Las Vegas. Both D.C. and Vegas feed on human weakness, Coburn said. They are addictive cultures—to gambling in Vegas and to power in D.C. Both places reward hustlers. “You think you can get something for nothing,” Coburn says. “You think you can really go to Las Vegas and win? If you could, then we’d all go to Las Vegas and then Las Vegas would not be there anymore. Both Washington and Las Vegas are something-for-nothing cultures.”