A multi-part series chronicling Senator Harry Reid of Nevada at the twilight of his career and facing near certain defeat in 2010

Part One: No Bacon, Just Crumbs; No Real Clout

‘…Where’s our pork?

Democratic senators and congressmen are famous for bringing home the bacon. With Harry Reid, we should have all kinds of goodies to show for our representation.

The Las Vegas Beltway might have been built by Uncle Sam as I-215, not by Clark County, or maybe we might have had a second or even a third beltway to alleviate congestion.

What about the environment? You’d think there would have been some kind of solar energy project on the scale of past Nevada projects like Hoover Dam, Nellis, the wartime plants in Henderson, something to show off one of our abundant natural resources, and fight our dependence on foreign oil.

How about health? Take UMC. Around the country, a lot of university medical centers are involved in various cutting-edge research projects. Do we associate UMC with life-saving medical research or horror stories?

Water’s another challenge facing Las Vegas. In times past, politicians with a lot of clout got projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Central Arizona Project, Central Utah Project and many others built over the years. Have we seen a Southern Nevada Project to build the water lines to the north? Or get water released from Lake Powell to keep Lake Mead’s water level full or at least up above crisis levels? Powerful senators in the past were able to horse trade and do things like this…’

This was a letter to the editor in Las Vegas City Life on August 27, 2009, and I’ll assume he’s a Democrat—I’ve not met or talked to him—but his narrative is one that I have heard at least 1000 times just this year—from Democrats!

To add insult to the writer’s very legitimate grievances, the Las Vegas Sun ran a piece the following Sunday joyfully proclaiming that Senator Harry Reid had brought home only 144 of a lousy 165 million dollars in earmarks this year; that’s millions, not billions as senate majority leader, and in a billions and trillions world of federal outlays.

And that’s just earmarks, not our regular federally appropriated outlays for major projects; we’re last or near to last there too; always, consistently last, or near to last under Senator Harry Reid’s ‘leadership’.

With an approval rating hovering in the 30 percentile, this doesn’t bode well for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. When your own party’s partisans are open to looking at someone else, anyone else, your career and aspirations are in descent and decline; a terrible place to be sitting seeking your 5^th term to the US Senate.

13 months is a long time, especially in politics, but trends are trends, and politicos to regular non-activist voters are sensing the season is changing in Nevada if only the Republicans can put up a credible challenger that can attract crossover voters.  They don’t need many, because Senator Harry Reid himself provides more than enough impetus for the GOP come out and vote next November.

GOP turnout in Nevada should exceed 80%, and the independents who decide statewide elections, should break for Harry Reid’s challenger, 65/35+.

Nevada is an early voting state, it’s also a purple state, libertarian leaning, conservative, and with a political mindset that it still is a tiny tumbleweed state of no consequence on the national stage.

Senator Harry Reid’s inability to bring home the bacon proves the point.

Nevada is still basically run by the same 50 people who ran it 20 years ago, but no one bothered to take into account that our state now has 2 million more people than it did then.  We’re still cocooned, isolated, and insulated from the rest of the country, and we generally prefer it that way—even the 2 million transplants.

No one made the preparations for a much larger, more sophisticated electorate either, especially in the Democratic Party. All efforts have been singularly to re-elect Harry Reid, and the results are mixed, at best. Harry Reid Inc made some terrible miscalculations in recent years, with no alternate plans or any ability to turn-on-a-dime, and those mistakes are what will likely defeat him in 2010.

There are a few people here who believe that President Obama’s personal charisma will help Senator Reid, who not-so-covertly supported Senator Hillary Clinton, and whose disastrous early caucus caused thousands of Democratic partisans to flood the local newspapers with complaints demanding a primary.  A short time later, the Clark County Democratic Convention imploded under the weight of its arrogant former chair, John Hunt, who was hand-picked to chair the county party on Harry Reid’s behalf.  His ‘election’ was a fix from the get-go and his friends robbed the local party’s coffers blind for two solid years.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars ‘migrated’ directly into the pockets of connected insiders leaving a shell organization that doesn’t have an annual fundraiser event for this year scheduled!

Choosing Hunt was a major miscalculation by Harry Reid and his political paramour, Rebecca Lambe-Jolley, who currently earns more than twice what the executive director of NVDEMS does; all for steering the party’s ship directly into political icebergs.

President Obama won Nevada despite Harry Reid Inc’s NVDEMS, not because of it—I know, I was there—Obama had his own operations separate from the state and local party, the first Democratic nominee to have ever done that in Nevada.

The Clark County Democratic Party has no organization, no structures, and while they were frittering away a voter registration surge and a lot of money, the local Republicans built a formidable presence in every corner of Clark County, which is geographically as large as the entire state of Massachusetts, with a population of nearly 2 million people.  This is important because Clark is the most populous county in Nevada and the state’s Democratic stronghold.

For all of the enthusiasm that 2008 brought with the election of Barack Obama, there aren’t even trained resident Democratic captains in each precinct, Assembly District, or County Commission District as the Nevada GOP now has.

Judge for yourselves:

www.ClarkDems.com

www.ClarkGOP.org

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. How it was supposed to turn out was that the early caucus was supposed to guarantee Hillary Clinton’s winning the nomination and the presidency, and she would in turn take care of Nevada and Harry Reid.

She did win the caucus, but ended up win one fewer delegate that day, and stubborn-‘til-the-end Harry Reid Inc Nevada super-delegates, held out until almost the DNC in Denver before coming on board to the nominee and now President of the United States.

By this time 29 years earlier, former Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt had delivered 13 Executive Branch appointments and many interns from President Ronald Reagan for Nevada.  Today, Nevada has one, and that was by default.

Harry Reid couldn’t even deliver a single White House intern from Nevada; there are none today.

That’s how a now sitting president answers political knives in his back from primary season: no outlays, no earmarks, and no appointments; no love for Harry Reid Inc and Nevada.

President Obama made good on his promise to voters to stop Yucca Mountain—and its enormous payroll that is now contributing greatly to the worst jobless rate in Nevada history—but he stopped short of pulling the license application; waiting for Harry Reid’s defeat and the nuclear industry bringing a royalty payment ballot initiative to Nevada voters, similar to what Alaska does with their pipeline, in the coming years.

That giant Yucca payroll super-lubricated the state’s gaming industry too, and Senator Harry Reid is personally responsible for the loss of thousands of very high paying Yucca Mountain related jobs at the worst possible economic time; and which bought homes and filled video poker machines across the state.

Those Yucca-related employees vote too.  179,000 are ‘officially’ out of work in Nevada—that’s 13% unemployment—but experts place the true number as closer to 280,000. Harry Reid refuses to lead on a year-long extension of unemployment benefits despite his state being among the first very hard hit hard back in 2007, and thousands losing their SEB’s each week in Nevada

These 179,000 people vote too.

Yes, President Obama came to Las Vegas to get his political duties out of the way with Harry Reid; he is not expected back to help Reid any further and after the fall session is over, the separation, if not the divorce, will be final between Obama and Reid.

Team Obama and the left wing of the party have always wanted Senator Richard Durbin as Majority Leader, and they’ll get him one way or another. Durbin has long had the votes to oust Reid.

That’s really some clout Harry Reid has today!  #5O in stimulus, a lousy 144 million in earmarks from him this year, an angry electorate blaming Harry Reid for high paying job losses here in southern Nevada, but also in northern Nevada where he personally intervened to stop the construction of coal fired power plants very necessary here, and then his completely ignoring Nevada’s other major population center in Reno.

Today, Senator Harry Reid has only 1 of 17 counties; the other 16 are gone with no chance of them ever coming back. His pluralities coming out of Democratic-vote rich Clark County will be the lowest of his entire political life.

No one can win Nevada with just one county.

No bacon, just crumbs; no real clout; its all smoke and mirrors Vegas-style illusion that Nevada voters just aren’t buying anymore.

And this is how Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, is viewed all across his home state today.

Mike Zahara
09132009
www.WatchDogWag.com

Coming Soon: Nevada’s Transporation Travesty all thanks to Harry Reid