By
In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is
portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator
from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.
Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has
accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the
accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent
response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides
have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a
source they will not name.
Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could
be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10
years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their
responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid
has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either.
The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not.
He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.
For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack.
As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the
Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad
feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is
done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very
personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.
Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He
is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of
President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke
Reid. The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked
its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid
and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly
needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his
insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.
The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to
draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When
Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all
credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he
says. Now, it’s impossible.
As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face
that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking
cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has
come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.
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