Searching for Harry Reid

...He loves to meddle at all political levels...

...He has also shown tremendous leadership blocking extreme judicial nominations...

...He loves it so much that he mentions it every time he gives a speech, telling anyone who is willing to listen that his father was a hard-rock miner and his mother took in laundry...

...Harry Reid's father would commit suicide just as his son, the politician, was in the early days of his career...

...There he met his wife, Landra Gould, and his mentor, a teacher named Mike O'Callaghan...

...It's much in the news these days as the birthplace and home of the new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid...

...I'm very consistent...

...Reid returned to Henderson years later with a law degree from George Washington University and served as the city attorney...

...He was an amateur boxer before entering politics...

...Still another picture, undated, shows his father, Harry Reid Sr., standing against a series of vertical slats, a mop of dark hair rising from his head as if on fire, undershirt tucked into his pants, long thin arms in his pockets, a dog at his feet...

...I worked with Senator Daschle for six years as the assistant to the leader so I know the job...

...His high school picture shows a clean-cut and serious young man with a shiny forehead, hair combed carefully up along the sides with a wave across the front...

...The day after Bush's election, TalkLeft.com posted a notice supporting Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois for minority leader...

...But it's not at all certain that Harry Reid is the kind of politician who would want to make serious changes anyway...

...But the word most commonly used to describe the Senator is tough...

...He doesn't walk around acting important," she tells me...

...Despite being anti-abortion, he's mostly quiet about it...

...Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL, the primary political arm of the pro-choice movement, had only this to say: "We have worked with Senator Reid on improving women's access to birth control and other health options...

...He even wrote a scholarly book about the town, Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail, published by the University of Nevada Press...

...A Nevada politician can never really be certain of the prevailing political winds and often plays catchup, the exact predicament of the Democrats on the national stage...

...Despite an initial backlash, after Reid secured the post much of the furor died down...

...There's another picture, a young Harry Reid, six or seven, in front of a larger wooden house built from railroad ties...

...But doing the job is one thing, wearing the mantle is something else altogether...

...Though he voted for NAFTA, he's voted against similar arrangements with Singapore and Chile...

...The big issue of the day is cooperation," Reid says...

...Michael Green, a Nevada political historian, agrees...

...In the new session, with the midterm elections already present in the near distance, those decisions will affect the nation in a way the founders of camp Searchlight could scarcely have imagined...

...It's possible Harry Reid is the most liberal politician one could hope for to hold statewide office out of Nevada...

...An adviser from Reid's first Senate campaign in 1986, Joseph McCullough, an English professoratUNLV, remembers him as a man who sought counsel before making decisions...

...In Vegas near the garish Hard Rock Hotel and Casino I meet with Jon Ralston, the political correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun...

...Alternet also pointed out that Durbin voted against the war in Iraq...

...He's known as a no-holds-barred backroom dealer and is given most of the credit for engineering the defection of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords that gave the Democrats a brief majority in the Senate...

...A place that appreciates small government and smaller taxes, though it doesn't mind taking a handout once in a while...

...Even Ralph Nader had kind words for Reid, calling him a "straight-out defender of Social Security," and saying, "he may surprise people in a good way...

...And he doesn't relate well with the media...

...Toward the end of his tenure, Reid narrowly escaped a hit after a bomb was found plugged into the engine of his family car...

...A wooden shack with a stovepipe chimney, surrounded by empty desert, two phone poles off in the distance...

...With the new road just completed, cutting the commute from Vegas to under an hour, it's only a matter of time before this little town that could is submerged beneath Vegas's endless sprawl...

...He's Machiavellian, ruthless...

...He cites an unwillingness by Democrats in the past to reach out...

...People were surprised when he twice called the President a liar on Yucca Mountain, but that's the way he is...

...He's a strong backer of Social Security, providing cover in fights over Republican budget proposals by insisting on inserting language protecting the program...

...He is a scary guy," Ralston says of Reid...

...It would have stayed that way if they hadn't discovered a water table a few hundred feet in the ground while digging for oil...

...We don't need to change who we are or what we believe in, we just have to do it better," he adds...

...He tells an old local joke that goes like this: former Senator Richard Bryan "woke up in the morning wondering if he'd shaken everybody's hand...

...I arrive in Searchlight on a cold afternoon in early January, two months after the Presidential election, the Democratic Party in disarray and on the defensive...

...There are pictures of the house the Senator was born in...

...On his website, the Senator does not offer much in the way of contrition for that vote...

...Most people who know him share the same opinion, and even his detractors defend him as an honest broker...

...She shows me a quote from one of the early miners that possibly explains the name of the town...

...According to the Senator, Searchlight is the kind of place the Democrats are going to have to appeal to if they hope to take back power...

...If they want to get something done they need to work with us...

...The job is something I understand...

...With major fights coming up over the fate of Social Security and Republican-appointed judges, progressives have settled into a wait-and-see attitude with the Senator...

...Harry Reid is a pro-life converted Mormon, vocal in his opposition to gay marriage, unlikely to appeal to the activist faction of the party...

...So if the President wants to do something about debt, education, jobs, let him work on it with us...

...We're a powerful minority...

...It's easy to see why the Senator loves Searchlight...

...Harry Reid wakes up in the morning wondering if he's gotten back at all his enemies...

...If the major pro-choice organizations are not willing to fight a pro-life Senator heading the Democratic Party, it's hard to see where the opposition will come from...

...We will continue to work with him on these and other issues on which we find common ground...

...We need as Democrats to not be afraid to go places outside the big cities...

...The Democrats hope that the Senator's toughness will help them in fights where they are badly outnumbered...

...Though he does not support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (on the grounds that it interferes with states' rights), he did vote for the Defense of Marriage Act...

...Because of southern Nevada's exploding population, state politicians have to introduce themselves to hundreds of thousands of new voters every time they run for office, making it nearly impossible for an elected official to build up the kind of political capital necessary to effect serious change...

...He argues that the world is a safer place without Saddam and stresses continuing the search for WMD, suggesting it's possible they were "smuggled out of the country...

...He hadagood team andhewas genuinely interested in everyone's opinions," McCullough says...

...There was no high school in Searchlight, so Harry had to hitchhike to Basic High in nearby Henderson...

...He once wouldn't talk to me for two years because he didn't like something I wrote...

...Coming upon Boulder Ridge, I'm confronted by the headlights spilling over the pass from across the range...

...I had to wonder if we were talking about the same person...

...Searching for Harry Reid by Stephen Elliott Illustration by Monica Hellstr?m An hour down the interstate, fifty-four miles southeast of Las Vegas on a new four-lane highway, sits the old mining town of Searchlight...

...Stephen Elliott is the author of the novel "Happy Baby" and the political memoir "Looking Forward to It: Or, HowILearned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process...

...He points out that John Kerry lost disastrously in rural Nevada, and had he done better there he could have taken the state...

...He earns 88 percent approval from the American Public Health Association...

...Despite his socially conservative positions, when taken as a whole, according to On the Issues, a nonpartisan website documenting Senate voting records, Harry Reid is a left-leaning populist...

...A sign in front of the Golden Nugget Casino in Searchlight reads: Harry Reid, Independent Like Nevada...

...You can't appeal to rural voters if you don't go to rural voters," he says...

...It's said that Harry Reid makes his big decisions breathing the dry air walking the quiet empty hills surrounding his hometown...

...Reid continues to live here...

...I stand in front of the town's only casino, staring west across the valley to where the crabgrass and cedar roll up into the mountain range separating the town from the city on the other side...

...By the time I leave Searchlight to return to the slick neon of Las Vegas, it's gotten late and what's left of the sun is hidden by storm clouds...

...I meet Jane Overy at the Searchlight Museum, a single room in the community center that also houses a meeting room and the town library...

...Regarding the likely new head of the Democratic National Commitee, Howard Dean, Reid says, "I'm not sure Howard Dean is the answer to our problems...

...They control the House...

...I'm not sure we need more acrimony...

...I never planned on being the Senate Minority Leader," Reid tells me...

...He's spoken of as a man capable of bringing people together as well as someone you do not cross...

...He voted to authorize force in Iraq...

...Rural and spacious...

...We basically look forward to working with him in his new role...

...He's done the dead work...

...In a recent press release, the Senator makes the ambiguous promise to bring Searchlight values to his position: a hard-work, commonsense approach for unity and change...

...He wanted honest opinions on all the issues...

...And while supporting a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, he doesn't talk much about that issue, either...

...I don't skip around...

...Alternet also posted a plea for Richard Durbin, warning that Harry Reid could not be expected to fight anti-abortion Justices nominated to the Supreme Court under Bush...

...In this sparse and rugged spot, with a population hovering around 800, the houses are modest, many of them trailer homes...

...He's also very popular with the unions, commandeering a 100 percent voting record from the AFL-CIO...

...In 1977, he was appointed chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a board notoriously dominated by the mob...

...The White House is controlled by the Republicans...

...It's no secret...

...The urban centers of Reno and Las Vegas are much more conservative than bedrock Democratic cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago...

...But while there's a lot of agreement as to who the Senator is and how he works, his political leanings and the impact he's likely to have as a leader of the Democratic Party are subject to debate...

...Overy, who oversaw the creation of the museum, explains when the town was founded it was nothing more than a mining claim fourteen miles from the Colorado River...

...It should at least be useful in keeping the caucus in line and putting across a united front...

...It's a place not unlike the America that elected George Bush...

...If there is gold in this rock," it says, "we'd need a searchlight to find it...

...The mining town, like the Democratic Party, is going to have to change...

...Nevada is a state that is closer to libertarian than anything else, and Reid is going to have to walk that line to avoid Tom Daschle's fate...

...At thirty-five degrees, it's about as cold as it gets in this part of the state...

...And though their house "didn't have hot water or an inside toilet, it was truly a family home to me and my three brothers...

...Susanne Martinez, vice president for public policy at Planned Parenthood, had a similar statement: "Senator Reid has done a lot of work to help advance our agenda and we consider him a friend on those issues...

...For right or wrong Howard Dean is recognized as part of the left, the anti-war crowd...

...But on closer inspection, the Senator is more liberal than many give him credit for...

...That's what they call it in the mines, the hard work that you do to get the prize...

...Liberal is a bad word in a state where representatives of the Bureau of Land Management are greeted at the door with guns and dogs...

...Reid was unfazed, calling mob representative Joe Agosto a hoodlum...

...After that, Harry Reid took to starting his car by remote control...

...He voted against a ban on assault weapons and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association...

...Reid's positions on abortion, guns, and Iraq should make him anathema to many in the progressive community...

...In 1968, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly at the age of twenty-eight and two years later became the state's youngest lieutenant governor, winning as Mike O'Callaghan's running mate...

...They control the Senate...

...Asked to describe himself, the Senator says, "I am just how I am...

...I'm dependable...

...The first challenge for the Senator is not letting his constituents know that...