That story about Reid was in a New Yorker profile (if you’re interested, you could probably Google the link) a few years ago. Being from Nevada, it’s really pretty damn funny that Reid is encountering the flagrantly — almost effusively — corrupt Blago in Illinois. But someone wanted to bribe Reid, and IIRC it was around the time of Abscam. Evidently, Reid reported it to the FBI, or else they were listening in and apparently one or two law enforcement people had to pull Reid away from the guy who had tried to bribe him because Reid was so insulted, incensed, and indignant.

Say what you will, but that actually synchs with my sense of some of the people that I grew up around. They’re traditionally ‘outside’ of mainstream, the moved West and worked unbelievably hard to settle what was essentially ‘barren scrub land’, and the women… man, what stamina those earlier generations had (!). Really impressive, whether you happen to agree with their politics, or not. So because of my background, I found that New Yorker story about Reid totally believable.

Also interesting, at the time it was published, I think it was pre-Katrina and Reid had just become Senate Leader because the GOP sleazebots had screwed Daschle. And at that time, many (if not most) of Reid’s constituents still thought that Bush was a good guy, doing his best, no more 9-11’s blah-blah-blah. And you could tell that Reid was — in NEVADA! — telling his Mormon constituents that he thought GWBush was not who they hoped he’d be. Anyway, basically his constituents still liked Bush at that time, and he was NOT telling them what they wanted to hear… and he’s now been shown to be accurate (in spades!).

As for the Mormons, I really try not to comment much about CA’s Prop 8, which I think was so far beyond appalling that it’s upsetting. But the Mormons put a lot of money into that anti-gay measure.

So, lllphd, IIRC you are a shrink?
Well… when AIDS was first in the news in the early 1980s, I recall my father being really mournful one day, and it turned out that a Mormon man from Salt Lake City, for whom he had the highest regard, had come into his office looking like an ashen, listless ghost. My father was really alarmed for his friend, and got him out for a walk at lunchtime. The man could hardly keep himself together; his wife and he had a son on whom their ’sun’ rose and shone. He was living in SF and had just contacted them that he’d contracted AIDS. They had not realized their son was gay, and upon realizing that they were going to lose him, they were also unable to call upon the support of their local ’stake’ (Mormon church) that was a central pillar of their lives. So here were these fine, decent people losing what was most dear in their lives, and they felt they could not tell their best friends and the neighbors who’d watched this young man grow up.

Don’t tell me that doesn’t take a huge toll.
I don’t know whether they left their church, but they certainly felt profoundly alienated.

And having grown up in a community, I’ll simply stop by pointing out that not everyone grows up heterosexual; not even in Mormon families. I have a quiet suspicion that the Mormon support of Prop 8 is more quietly, profoundly tragic than most on the ‘lefty blogs’ really understand. When you basically funnel money to tell your own siblings that the way God made them doesn’t skew with what the church says, then… I dunno. It just makes me want to pass out Q-tips to clean out their ears so they can listen better to the pauses and silences about what people are too afraid to talk about within their own families.

Tragic and wasteful beyond belief.

But I don’t blame Harry Reid for that situation.

BTW: That New Yorker article also speaks of Reid as having grown up with alcoholic parents, on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in a little dustpit mining town. Don’t know where you are from, but that suggests to me that he grew up among Basques, Native Americans, and Mormons. IMHO, take any two of the fore mentioned groups and you’re talking about some of the toughest ethnic groups in this nation.

I watch the lefty blogs rail about Reid, but my own personal background based in arid regions of the West, and I really think that the lefty blogs totally underestimate Reid, and they completely misread him.

I also find it fascinating – sort of in terms of ‘watching dramas play out’ that Reid, a guy who made his own way, who would know a lot about alcoholism – seems to really have a sixth sense about GWBush. One thing we know for sure is that GWB has a thin skin and he ‘goes ballistic’ whenever his ego is publicly trashed. And watch how low-key Reid (and Pelosi) always are when they deal with GWB.

Honestly, it seems to me that we often get way too emotional.
IMHO, historians will have far more regard for Reid than we do today.
He’s far more ‘below the surface’ and steady than the hysterics on the lefty blogs seem to see.

People on the left underestimate his toughness, they underestimate his fundamental decency (at least, that’s my guess), and they underestimate his near-brilliant handling of an extremely dangerous GWB and Dick Cheney.

Okay, off my soapbox now.

>do you realize what it must have taken for Harry Reid to get to college, let alone law school?

Um, a willingness to suck up to those who were more powerful? A keen attention to the whims of the powerful, honed as a weak child of mercurial alcoholic parents? Or toughness and determination? Or luck in attracting a valuable mentor outside the family who had access to some financial resources? Or maybe decent intelligence, a few good teachers, and public financing of post-secondary education at a time when it was possible to find decent jobs out west to put yourself through school if you weren’t indian?

Or some combination of one, two or even three of those?

No, I don’t actually know. But I’m not particularly convinced by your speculation either. There are lots of potential ways to make it. Having grown up through some difficulty does not automatically make one the-best-of-all-possible-leaders of-Democrats.

To all of you information and insights, I thank you…seeing people in the round is too often veiled by emotion, distractions and desire. I see Reid differently

But remember, the possible candidates for this Senatorial appointment all have their own rounded lives also. One of my despairs is that the viseral self knowledge of being African American has cultural triggers that pierce deeply into an individual and en masse to the whole body of Black brown yellow red and white peoples. To ignore this is a blindness not insignificant to progress.

dear reader, i always ALWAYS enjoy your input! it’s absolutely so thoughtful and circumspect, and boldly willing to take your own perspective.

this has been so helpful, and yes, it was that nytimes piece on reid that told that story of reid’s outrage. i remember being mighty impressed by the whole picture of him, and it has informed my estimate of his positions and decisions ever since.

i could not agree with you more on every point you make. first, that reid’s background is even far more impressive than obama’s in terms of what he faced and had to overcome. and i think i made the point earlier that his NV background must certainly have learned some poker face skills. i think also he shares this trait with obama, which is something i truly admire. namely, this capacity to scope out all the players, their cards and their skills and their faces, and just catalog it all and keep it all in mind for future reference.

something that you touched on is this tendency of progressives to expose a hyper-ideological bent that can be utterly non-productive, even counter-productive. in fact, i find myself often making comparisons between the entitled attitudes and demanding rhetoric of the far left and right, as if their elected official ‘owes’ it to THEM to do their bidding. something that gets very lost in this particular shuffle is that this really goes directly against the grain of a true democracy. anyone taking that attitude is bordering way close to the edge of tyranny, as we saw with the rightwingnut religious fanatics. it’s unbecoming, at best.

but most importantly, it is absolutely NOT democratic. i think reid and obama fully recognize this, along with many others, but almost totally (now, at least) the democrats. that’s one of the biggest reasons i continue to support the party. kinda like will rogers’ reason, not a member of any organized political party. herding cats and all that jazz.

the failure to see the importance of this sensitivity, this “we’re all in this together, and we’ll get more done if we try our best to attend to as many folks as we can” thang. it’s very fdr and grapes of wrath and apple pie and american way schmaltzy, but that’s where i am.

now, i’m not trying to say that compromising morality should be a matter of course for this sentiment. in fact, one should strive to never compromise integrity. however, it is also immensely important to keep in mind that holding to integrity in one situation may force you to compromise a larger form of integrity in another, more comprehensive situation with larger and more dangerous implications for more people.

what i think a lot of extreme progressives fail to recognize, and again in the same way rightwingnuts fail, is that at the level of a democratic congress, these decisions are not always clear or easy. compromises must be made; that is simply inherent in a democracy. one person’s absolute moral may not even enter into another’s equation. people can disagree in entirely opposite ways (e.g., abortion) for entirely the same reasons (e.g., religious). the spectrum is enormous and vast, and often one position must be compromised in order to obtain a bigger prize later on. so it goes.

i’m not trying to wax too idealistic here, nor do i want to paint to glib a picture. i just wanted to emphasize this way in which we seem to agree on how much more complex the roles of our reps on the hill really are. and that too many progressives, to my mind, fall prey to the tyrannical and demanding positions of the extreme progressives.

reid i think recognizes this full well. and sure, nextstopchicago does make a good point, but reid just does not strike me as terribly tainted. the way i look at it, if there were viable goods on reid, the gopers would have wrung it to death by now. it just drives them nuts to have to deal with a reasonably clean dem. that’s when they just start making things up. kerry and the swift boaties the easiest case in point.

a decent man, kerry, as is reid. and to think that he might be a suck up also might miss the point wrt reid. no doubt he learned early on which side of his bread the butter is on, and anyone is wise to tend to such information. can’t fault anyone for that. but the LAST descriptive i’d put to reid is a suckup.

at that level of power, and responsibility, one must have a very broad scope and make each decision carefully with a keen eye to the larger objectives. this is a point i’ve tried to emphasize elsewhere (ahem) in the past, with remarkably nasty responses from our supposedly progressive brethren. but another point on which we agree fully is that many (not all, i admit) of the compromises the dems have had to make during this nightmare called the bush years were to a great extent unavoidable. i find it extremely difficult to imagine what it would be like to be put in the unprecedented and absolutely surreal circumstances of post 9/11. in fact, i’d have been rendered unsteady with the 12/10/00 supremes decision; what could it possibly have meant for democrats of integrity. i mean, not even jeffords was able to stomach what was going on, and nothing had even happened yet!

and it just got more bizarre. and, i submit, dangerous. as i mentioned in a comment on ew’s antrhax post, i simply would not put anything past what cheney was willing to do at that time, knowing that wellstone reported he’s threatened him and his behavior toward leahy, then leahy gets the envelope, as does daschle. etc. you know, you find yourself in a position like that, and all the stakes shift. these suckers were beyond unreasonable, they were dangerous. deadly dangerous. i mean, christ, they were willing – eager, even – to torture, torch the constitution, let soldiers die and citizens drown. this was not your normal civil discourse they were dealing with, and i can well imagine the leadership had many closed door sessions where they spent full minutes just dumbfounded speechless before they could even begin to formulate anything resembling a strategy. i mean, what would that look like? none of the rules applied. it was all about loopholes, like those slimy lawyers the mob hires. how do you try to deal with that?

my suspicion is that the leadership determined to just lie low, try to hold as closely to as many small victories as they could, and hope that the real evildoers would eventually screw up and the tide would turn. in the meantime, i recall clearly the atmosphere at the time. bush’s approval ratings were in the 80s, and the echo chamber was deafening and vicious. all of us stood to lose if we raised our heads too high. there was no telling at that point how bad it would get. i was reminded just how hypervigilant i’d become after this 11/4 and the weight was lifted; the relief! utter relief!

i have no delusions that obama is the messiah or even capable of correcting even half the damage bush and his cronies have done. but neither bush nor obama are the point, ultimately; it’s us. and we’re pulling on a very strong wave that stands to hold for at least another generation, giving the polling of kids as young as 15; liberal is the new cool.

but we at some point soon need to really review just how bad it was, and i think to cut all those dems in congress some slack for what they had to face. feingold was able to stand tall because his constituency has long been behind him. same for kennedy and leahy. but the repug machinery was exceedingly treacherous; i just don’t think folks realize this. and they also don’t realize that there remain – by design and sinister plan – deep and extensive vestiges of this treachery. it will not just require participation for the citizenry to recover from this assault on our democracy; it will require a heightened and diligent persistence of all of us.

and we’ll need to hold all our reps’ feets to the fires, no doubt. i don’t want to dismiss the individual wheelin&dealin factor that inevitably goes on and undoubtedly interferes with ethical behavior. but i don’t think reid or feingold or kerry or kennedy or any number of others typically fall into that category. what they felt they had to do during this bleak period called the bush administration is another matter.

all this speaks to the impeachment issues, as well. for the longest i felt strongly we were being failed by congress because they did not take up impeachment. but i’ve come to recognize the hesitation was out of extreme but prudent caution. had the 110th taken this up would have been an enormous risk. bush had made it clear they would not cooperate or share documents or talk or anything like what would normally be expected of the process. they gave contempt of congress the full monty of meaning, they did. i therefore have come to see the wisdom in leaving this for the courts, and under the banner of an entirely new, democratic administration.

so now i’ve seen your soapbox and raised you about a dozen. apologies. i have little doubt that this has become a dialogue between us by now, and even doubt that you’re still checking in. but thanks for the inspiration and the concurring thoughts.

oh, and finally, on reid. yes, i do agree, and not just as a psychologist. one reason i am a psychologist is that i am fascinated and curious about people, as you describe yourself. i find reid entirely credible. he is low key, calm, tough, and smart. i would not want to get on his bad side, but i also see abundant capacity for his working across the aisle. i also see a great deal of warmth in him, which is the first thing i look for in anyone. i have not seen a republican with an ounce of warmth since before jeffords crossed over the aisle.

and to make the punctuating point on reid, and to speak to palli’s important points above, i find reid’s response to gregory’s queries about the accusations that his conversations with blago stemmed from racism far more credible than anything blago might let leak, even from his tail pipe.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..55080.html

methinks it would behoove all of us to consider just what blago is up to with all this. he’s hell bent on doing as much damage as he can because he knows he’s going down. he’ll leak anything at this point, so we need to be careful not to fall for his crap. but he’s clearly hoping one of his targets will yell uncle and pull him outa his hell hole before he has to see jail time. that seems to be his way of life.

oh, and on that point (chuckle; this soapbox is damn hard to get off of when you’ve been on it a while!!), i spoke with a pal from chicago today, someone who had been to a party last week and met a reporter who’s been on blago’s case for several years. the reporter said blago is just bad to the core, not smart but cunning like a fox, and obama never had anything to do with him beyond what was required politely and politically. there is most likely a good bit of the reverse-elitist resentment coming out of the blago camp, much like what we saw from palin and her ilk. which is again why i’ve been saying that we need to keep in mind that fitz has listened to all those conversations, so the fact that he has openly stated that obama is not involved should tell us something.

listen to reid’s confidence here; it reminds me of a subdued version of what his indignant wrath must have looked like with the abscam situation. and yeah, there is no ego there and no need to grandstand. he seems content to state the case and make his record clear. and just like blago to toss the racism card at him without doing his homework.

mormon he may be, but not a racist.

reader, thanks again very much for your insightful thoughts. fascinating to consider his background through the eyes of someone with your ‘dry western’ background, though more for your incisive take on it all.

the rest of you, if you’ve lasted this long, forgive me.

Thank you.
I so wanted to survive these past years since Dec 12, 2000 with the self-confidance and pride of my young days in the sixties, living lusiously with the full consciousness that I was living & doing the right and moral thing (civil rights and anti-war.) But with these foes there was no action, no message, no way to make them recognize the Right and Just, We were impotent and they knew [know] it and they reveled in it and forever will. They are opprobrious to the very idea of the human community.

Yes, and do you know that they “convert” all the non-Mormons that they find – dead or alive and it doesn’t matter if the people “converted” want it or not.

Oh yeah: they only proxy-convert dead people. Live ones they leave alone.