OPINION:
Harry Reid is having shrinking pains, choking on a diet of gall and wormwood. He is not dealing well with the events of last November, when he lost the comfort and prominence of the Senate. The Senate’s longtime Democratic leader revealed to an interviewer this week how the not-so-sweet mystery of life continues to elude him. He cannot understand why people don’t like him. He thinks it’s “unfortunate.”
Unfortunate it may be, but if anyone in Washington has worked harder to earn popular disdain and dislike than he was, it’s difficult to find that someone. Even as Mr. Reid lamented that Republicans talk trash about him when they should be debating ideas, he dismissed his Republican Senate counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, as “a lump of coal.” He professes not to care who the Republican nominee is next year because “they’re all losers.” Then for just a moment he saw himself as others see him. “I don’t mean to be mean-spirited,” he said. He then aimed a few ritual shots at the Koch brothers, denouncing them as “evil.”
We were heartened when Mr. Reid decided to pack it in when his current term ends next year, thinking it might improve the toxic air on Capitol Hill. His campaign to destroy the Senate was a close-run victory for decency despite his willingness to stoop as low as he could to accomplish his goals, besmirching and slandering those he doesn’t like. That’s what’s “unfortunate.”
Mr. Reid is not the only national politician to practice what the media calls “the politics of personal destruction,” but few practice it with such abandon and fewer still flaunt the pleasure they take in it. When he was called out not long ago for falsely accusing Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate of not paying his taxes “for 10 years,” he showed neither remorse nor repentance, or even embarrassment over being exposed as a liar. “Well,” he told an interviewer, “he lost, didn’t he?” Mr. Reid takes pride in the fact that in his world and in his mind, the end always justifies the means.
Even as he denounced the Koch brothers and other conservatives for spending money, fair and square, to advance ideas and help candidates they favor, Mr. Reid put together a super PAC that spent more money and time smearing candidates than any other, Republican or Democratic.
He’s a man without shame, and pleased as we were to hear that he’s going home to Nevada, we wish he would shut up and leave the political debate to those worthy of it. But he won’t, because he can’t. He’s Hapless Harry, contemplating a retirement in obscurity, craving a public platform from which he can hurl invective at anyone who disagrees with him.
When MSNBC’s Jonathan Harwood asked him what he thought he might do in retirement, he suggested that he might join Mr. Harwood on the air as an “analyst.” Surely not likely. MSNBC, though flailing about in the vast wasteland of television’s talking heads, desperate for viewers, surely has standards to preclude the hiring of a talking head proud of his willingness to tell lies.
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