The two most popular questions in the wake of the announcement that Democratic Senator Harry Reid won’t run for reelection are: Who will replace him in his Senate seat, and who will replace him in the leadership? These are both good questions (though it increasingly appears Chuck Schumer will replace Reid in the leadership without too much of a fight). But in addition, another unavoidable question is what Reid’s pending retirement says about his own hopes for his party’s chances to retake the Senate majority. The answer is: he is clearly pessimistic.
Whether that’s correct remains to be seen especially because the quality of the candidates in the various Senate races has yet to be determined. That played a role in the fact that Reid is still in the Senate in the first place: he successfully intervened in the Republican primary in 2010 on behalf of the weakest general-election candidate in the race. And it absolutely made a difference.
But no one who has followed Reid’s career can miss his hunger for power or his efforts to rebuild Senate procedure around an utter contempt for the minority party. And both of those are surely factors in the timing of his retirement. In that sense, then, Reid’s retirement is a bad omen for Democrats. That’s not because they can’t hold the seat–indeed, there’s an argument to be made that the Democrats would have an even better chance to hold the seat without the increasingly incoherent demagogue muttering about libertarian activists hiding under his bed.
Nor can it be said that Reid is retiring because he’s giving up on the Senate. Reid gave up on the Senate a long time ago, which is about when he polished off his sledgehammer and starting swinging away at the procedural foundations of what was once unironically called the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” In much the way that Ted Kennedy destroyed the Supreme Court confirmation process and thus the intellectual core of the judicial branch’s democratic role, the Senate is not likely to ever fully recover, if it recovers at all, from Reid’s prolonged assault on its democratic character.
The difference now is that Reid has to live in the minority. In other words, he has to walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes (though it’s more likely that Reid’s driver would chauffeur him that mile) and he doesn’t much like it. Reid is the classic example of the authoritarian attitude “for my friends–everything. For my enemies–the law.” Rules are for chumps, as far as Reid is concerned.
It tells you something interesting about Reid. He has built his career with an aura of toughness, the scrappy former boxer who can throw–and take–a punch. Perhaps that’s always been a myth, or perhaps he’s mellowing with age (though his constant temper tantrums would suggest otherwise), but it turns out Reid isn’t so tough after all. He’s brittle, unprincipled, and surprisingly whiny.
Reid, the man who lives at a D.C. Ritz Carlton, keeps as much distance from the masses–whose odor Reid publicly laments–as is possible in a city like Washington. He could never live like the encumbered taxpayer he leeches off of, and he could never sit in the same powerless Senate minority he requires of his own political opponents. He’s a pampered squish; an entitled hypocrite. He is weak.
Which is why he’s leaving. He’s had enough. When the Democrats lost control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, Reid’s team lashed out, in public, at the Obama White House. To someone like Reid, it’s always someone else’s fault, even though he was the Senate team leader. And now he’s taking his ball and going home. Serve in the loyal opposition, the faithful minority? Who could live like that, like a common person? What is he, a farmer?
What’s interesting is that Democrats didn’t appear to have an impossible climb back to the majority just two years after losing it. The electoral landscape is relatively favorable to them, and they will presumably have presidential-year turnout with the Clinton money machine behind it. They were not facing such long odds.
Apparently Reid doesn’t agree. He’s taken the measure of his fellow Democrats and found them wanting. If he can’t return to power, he might as well go live his life of luxury without the headache of having to answer to the people. All along, we thought Reid was a fighter. Turns out, he’s a coward. He’ll be missed if only because he was such a perfect poster child for all that ails American politics.
