When Harry Reid chosen as our Senate leader, I was a bit worried. Why are we choosing a pro-life red-state guy to lead our party? I felt a little better about him when I heard that he was a master of Senate floor procedure. If he wins a vote or two by pulling crazy tactical maneuvers to outflank Bill Frist, I'll be really happy. The personal stories about how he took on special interests who tried to
blow up his car and grabbed the throat of someone trying to bribe him are also cool, but I'm wary of drawing any connections between that stuff and what a guy will do politically.
The recent Jim VandeHei article in the WaPo -- a really good one on how the administration is manufacturing 'crises' -- makes me feel even better. Reid gets three nice sound bites, which I've reproduced below the fold. Plus, from the way he's talking, it's looks like he's going to fight Social Security privatization (and judges who don't respect people's rights) like hell.
So first we have a simple, serviceable soundbite that appears at the top:
"This White House had made an art of creating crisis where a crisis does not exist," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Then we have Reid doing the populist thing that wins Democrats elections:
"It is a crisis created in the mind of the White House because they want to take care of the fat cats on Wall Street," Reid said. He argued that Social Security is primed to pay out full benefits until 2055 -- even if no changes are made. Many Democrats propose small and gradual changes such as raising the payroll tax or reducing future benefits, perhaps just for the wealthy, to head off problems. Reid and most Democrats oppose private Social Security accounts.
This last one is my favorite:
Finally, Bush accuses Democrats of creating a "vacancy crisis" on the courts by opposing his nominees. Republicans claim Democrats have abused the Senate filibuster by blocking 10 of the president's 229 judicial nominees in his first term -- although confirmation of Bush nominees exceeds, in most cases, the first-term records of presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. "Does that sound like a crisis? Only if you failed math really badly," Reid said.
You might have a Lakoff kind of worry here -- we don't want to activate a 'crisis' frame by using the word a lot, which Reid is doing. Lakoff's classic example is Nixon's 'I am not a crook,' which helped everyone realize that Nixon was a crook. But I think people also have a 'false crisis' frame. (By contrast, I don't think there's really a 'false crook' frame, or at least not one that connects to the word 'crook.') It seems to me that Reid succeeds in activating the 'false crisis' frame, which we want to do.
I hope these are the words of a man who's going to going to twist the arms of other red-state Democrats in the Senate to make sure the Bush plan doesn't get a single Democratic vote. It'll be easier now than it would've been two years ago. By now Bush has got a very long track record of screwing anybody who gave him the benefit of the doubt or tried to meet him halfway. People on the left who mistrusted Bush from the beginning were correct, and by now nearly all of the centrists know that. I'd like to take Lieberman's turning down the Cabinet position as a sign that he's got it figured out, but that's probably too optimistic.
I don't know whether Reid is a Social Security true believer, committed to fighting to the death for a program he supports. He might instead be a sharp political operator who wants to raise the stakes because he's holding the aces. ('Both of the above' is also a possible answer.) For the time being, I don't really care. I just want to make sure Bush and his disastrous plan go down in flames. So this looks good to me.