Jon Ralston, contributing editor at Politico Magazine, has covered Nevada politics for more than a quarter-century. He has worked for both major Las Vegas newspapers and now has his own site, email newsletter and television program.

When I heard late last week that Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander—a Republican who was apoplectic about Harry Reid’s changing the Senate’s hoary filibuster rules—had said the majority leader should have the words “The End of the Senate” etched on his tombstone, I imagined what Reid’s reaction would be: a broad, wry smile.

In covering Reid for more than 25 years, I have seen that smile so many times. Reid is the most unconventional of politicians, one who cares little about public perception and delights in infuriating the opposition. He is the kind of guy who might walk up to Alexander and say, “Lamar, I hope you’ll deliver the eulogy so people really know what I have done.”


The former boxer’s ability to absorb blows and, even more importantly, to counterpunch, perhaps with an occasional hit below the belt, are the secrets of his longevity—and no doubt he will deploy them once again as the Senate fights this week over the budget deal. Unlike most of the preening Club of 100, Reid expends little effort tending to his public image. Driving home messages (the Tea Party is destructive) and advancing legislation (the nuclear option) are what energize this tireless son of Searchlight, Nev., a speck of a town outside Las Vegas where Reid’s hardscrabble childhood helped produce a man impervious to most political considerations and virtually immune to criticism.

The majority leader is a mélange of contradictions—a Machiavelli with malaprops (otherwise known as Reidisms)—but you can’t understand them just from the vantage point of the theater up on Capitol Hill. I’ve seen them revealed over a quarter century of close observation back in Nevada, where Reid, 74, has always been both a study in outperforming expectations and a political fighter with bare-knuckles ambition. Many still puzzle over this—how Reid can be at once a seemingly soulless manipulator of the process while occasionally revealing deeply held beliefs; a religious man proud of his Mormon faith who has metamorphosed into a social progressive; and an outwardly meek, bland figure whose cutthroat ways make him easily the most feared man in Nevada by politicians of both parties.

But Reid being Reid is inevitably on display when he comes back home. Consider his news-making tour of the state a few days ago, during which he managed to crassly describe Lucy Flores, an assemblywoman he hopes to install as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, as “demographically… perfect. Young, dynamic, Hispanic,” while calling another congressman from the state both a “lightweight” and “ hypocritical.” He even sneered at his fellow Nevada senator, Dean Heller, by comparing him unfavorably to his predecessor, John Ensign, who had an affair with his best friend’s wife. “I miss John Ensign,” Reid told the Las Vegas Sun. “ He was a man of his word.”

And then the topper, the Reidism of the week: When asked about his 2011 comments that prostitution in Nevada should be outlawed, Reid waved the white flag and said the only thing he’s doing right now to fight prostitution is “not giving them any business. That’s my protest.”

I wonder if the brothels can survive that economic hit.

Ralston calls Reid the "ultimate political survivor." Above, Reid in 1996. | Dennis Cook/AP Photo

For a guy who seems perpetually joyless (he’s not), Reid has been a joy to cover. His foot-in-mouth disease. His wry sense of humor—yes, he has one. His constant interference in other races. His surprising evolution on all manner of topics. But most of all, I continue to marvel at Reid’s indomitability—his ability keep alive a political career that should have been entombed nearly 40 years ago, when he lost his first Senate race by 611 votes and then followed that up with a landslide loss for mayor of Las Vegas six months later.

Reid is the ultimate political survivor, and I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat for two of his near-death experiences, in 1998 and 2010. The boxing metaphors so often wielded to describe the former pugilist have become hackneyed, but it’s true that Reid is the elected version of Rocky Balboa—ever the underdog, always taking a beating but somehow emerging with his hands raised upwards, battered but still standing.

***

To truly understand Reid, you have to go back to the beginning. To 1986. When Jim Santini launched his candidacy for the U.S. Senate that year, he could not have expected what would happen at his opening news conference.

A reporter had somehow gotten access to documents from an old, unresolved Federal Election Commission case and peppered the former congressman with questions about it. Santini, known to perspire, began sweating profusely.

That was the image Harry Reid, then an ambitious two-term congressman, and his campaign team were looking for—and they would go on to use the video from that press conference over and over during the campaign in a series of ads about the Democrat-turned-Republican with the tagline: “Which Jim Santini do you believe?”

The reporter who asked the questions had been fed the information by a former colleague who left journalism to work for Reid’s campaign. It was brutal and effective; it was consummate Harry Reid.

I began covering Nevada politics for the Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly after that news conference. I was in my mid-20s and had been in Nevada for two years covering cops and county government. When another reporter left the paper abruptly, I was thrown into the hurly-burly of a nationally watched Senate race between Reid, then 46, and Santini, who had been persuaded by retiring Republican Sen. Paul Laxalt to switch parties and run as a Republican for his vacant seat. It was the beginning of my long stint covering the most fascinating figure in Nevada politics—a thoroughly unprepossessing man and manifestly terrible candidate who nonetheless achieved unlikely campaign victories and went on to reach the pinnacle of congressional power.

What I remember most about the three-month blur that was the 1986 Senate contest was accompanying Reid on a trip that today would seem inconceivable: a bus tour of rural Nevada. (Rural Nevadans didn’t much like Democrats back then; now they loathe them and Reid most of all.) Reid was campaigning as “independent like Nevada,” claiming to run against the Washington establishment supporting Santini, although Reid was the one with the office on Capitol Hill. Even then, Reid had chutzpah. But he had yet to develop the partisan attack-dog reputation that these days finds him so reviled in the redder parts of Nevada (the “cow counties”) and the rest of America.

Reid was savvy enough, however, to know he would not be welcomed in places like Ely and Elko, so he brought along his mentor, Mike O’Callaghan, a blunt-spoken populist and much admired former governor. O’Callaghan, who had taught Reid at Basic High School in Henderson, Nev., before becoming governor, had appointed his protégé to the Nevada Gaming Commission, a cozy perch from which Reid ran for Congress in 1982.

O’Callaghan was still beloved across Nevada and also had a new role: executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun, where he looked out for Reid and, along with Brian Greenspun, the editor, made sure his coverage was not just good but often laudatory, even fawning. So far as Reid was concerned, he didn’t have to worry too much about media relations at the rival Las Vegas Review-Journal, where I worked, because he could count on the Sun to counter anything the more conservative daily put out there.

Thanks to O’Callaghan (who was also a gracious tour guide to me, the new guy from the other paper), Reid was welcomed in rural Nevada. I remember O’Callaghan introducing him at lunches and dinners, obviously more popular than Reid, his less dynamic surrogate son.

But what I recall most about that trip was Reid on the bus, hanging up from a call with Minority Leader Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.)—who was lobbying Reid to support him in the Senate Democrats’ internal leadership contest even before Reid was elected to the Senate—and being so angry that he declared he just might vote for Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) instead. Reid, who later in his career would talk as though he idolized Byrd, wouldn’t say what the slight was. But he was incensed. And that was the last time I saw him show any emotion at all, except during his eulogy at O’Callaghan’s funeral in 2004.

I remember the Byrd incident so well because it was so unlikely that Reid would consider backing the other guy: Johnston at the time was pushing to pass a nuclear waste measure that would later become known, at least in our state, as the Screw Nevada Bill, when it was enacted by Congress during Reid’s first term, given that the law meant 77,000 tons of highly toxic radioactive waste would be stored 100 miles from Las Vegas. Reid’s dalliance with Johnston would have been huge news if his temper had not abated, which, of course, it did.

Reid won the race (by 6 points) mostly because of that ad campaign with the sweating Santini, even though the outgoing Paul Laxalt essentially took over Santini’s campaign and persuaded his friend, President Ronald Reagan, to visit the state three times in the final weeks.

I remember thinking what a better candidate Santini was—when he wasn’t perspiring—than Reid. But despite the national GOP effort to defeat Reid, he held on. And that would become a familiar story.

Reid in Nevada in 1998. | Lennox McLendon/AP Photo

I have often thought that Reid has made little effort even to try to understand the media because, all in all, he’d rather be secreted in some back room, plotting a procedural move or preparing to fulminate at Republicans. He has an inability to be solicitous with reporters. He can’t fake it and doesn’t care a whit about his image.

The senator rarely has visited the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s conservative editorial board, but I remember one session early in his Senate career. Vin Suprynowicz, then a libertarian columnist, listened to Reid go through his Medicare talking points before wondering, “Why do we need Medicare, senator?”

Reid smiled as if it were a joke, then realizing it wasn’t, hesitated, looked around the conference table and retorted, “I really don’t know how to answer that.” So he didn’t.

Reid didn’t return to the RJ inner sanctum many times after that, nor did he do many one-on-one interviews. I talked to him infrequently on the phone over the years during non-campaign seasons, with those times becoming rarer as he moved up in leadership on far-off Capitol Hill.

But I remember in the early 1990s, shortly after I had made the transition from reporter to columnist, asking to speak to him about a column I was working on about him accepting honoraria for speaking engagements. Reid insisted to me that he needed the money to pay for his wife’s medical condition—she has Crohn’s disease—and when I suggested he was quite wealthy and could sell some of his vast real estate holdings (he reported assets of between $2.8 million and $6.3 million earlier this year), he responded by telling me he would not speak to me again if I wrote the column. I don’t believe he said goodbye.

Reid "has an inability to be solicitous with reporters," writes Ralston. "He can’t fake it and doesn’t care a whit about his image." | Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

I wrote it. And Reid cut me off for about two years.

I still recall the day the freeze-out ended. His longtime assistant, Marge Van Hoove, who died earlier this year, called to tell me the senator wanted to see me in his Las Vegas office. When I sat down in front of him, Reid told me, “I’ve decided to speak to you again.”

“Senator,” I replied, “you might have noticed that I continued to write about you all of this time. Who do you think lost in this proposition?”

As if he hadn’t heard me, Reid pivoted and began talking about some policy issue. I remember thinking: He just doesn’t care.

The senator has had only two real races since his first one for the Senate—that 1998 battle with then-Rep. John Ensign and the nationally infamous imbroglio in 2010 against Sharron Angle.

The 1998 race was fascinating to cover because Reid, already by then in leadership as the Senate minority whip, seemed to be in shock that the youthful Ensign—elected in a huge upset in a heavily Democratic congressional district during the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994—would dare challenge him after he had ascended so far for the state. As a candidate, Ensign was everything Reid wasn’t—telegenic and smooth. But Reid could barely contain his contempt, and during one memorable forum he looked at Ensign, who was making some legal point, and sneered, “What does a veterinarian know about the Constitution?”

Reid held on by 428 votes after a short-circuited recount—ended by Nevada’s then-secretary of state, Dean Heller, now Reid’s colleague in the Senate. Reid had done everything he could to stack the deck in his favor, trying to get a competitive Democrat into the governor’s race against an anointed GOP stalwart named Kenny Guinn. Reid eventually coaxed Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones into that contest to drive up turnout and draw women to the polls, inducing her to put her own money into what for her clearly was a futile cause. It was no coincidence that Reid confidante Susan McCue was installed as head strategist on Team Jones.

Reid had found a way to win a race he never should have won. And what he did afterward demonstrated that no one better understands the “no permanent friends, no permanent enemies” cardinal rule of politics. Ensign was elected to the Senate two years later, and Reid saw the advantages of holding an enemy close. From dinners with their wives to co-sponsoring Nevada-centric legislation to staying out of each other’s races, this was a symbiosis to remember. I began calling their marriage of convenience “Harry Ensign.”

Shortly after Reid’s victory over Ensign, I ran into the former at a charity event and found him in an unusually candid mood. He railed about how mismanaged his campaign had been in allowing a man he thought was unqualified to come so close, how he thought he deserved to lose and how he was going to revamp his organization. I could see the determination in his eyes, the steely will to survive that characterizes his career.

By the turn of the millennium, Reid’s organization was formidable. He brought in talented Democratic operatives from around the country, as he grew more partisan, too, leaving behind any pretense that he was “independent like Nevada.” As he moved up in the Democratic hierarchy, Reid had to fly the partisan flag more often; independent streaks could make the rungs on the leadership ladder a bit slippery.

Soon after his 2004 reelection and already looking ahead, Reid pulled off what looked like a masterstroke when he nominated a rising young GOP star, the state’s first Hispanic attorney general, Brian Sandoval, to serve on the federal bench. More than one observer noted that Reid had taken Sandoval out of the Senate sweepstakes forever with the lifetime appointment. (Not all plans work, even for Prince Harry: Sandoval left the bench in 2009, defeated Reid’s son, Rory, for governor and now is considered the leading contender against the majority leader in 2016.)

***

As Reid became more of a national figure, he carefully avoided the media spotlight, preferring to let others do the Sunday shows. But his lack of a self-editing mechanism resulted in a number of intemperate statements that went viral, including calling President George W. Bush a “ liar” and a “ loser,” which only cemented Reid’s growing reputation as a frothing partisan.

When Ensign was elected to the Senate in 2000 after losing to Reid in 1998, "Reid saw the advantages of keeping an enemy close," writes Ralston. "This was a symbiosis to remember." Above, Reid and Ensign in 2010. | Isaac Brekken/AP Photo

By the mid-aughts, he was in trouble back home, and he knew it. So when he announced that the Democratic National Committee had agreed in 2007 to make Nevada an early presidential caucus state, I remember chuckling. As all the headlines touted Nevada’s new national importance to politics, I wondered how much of the plan to bring organizational infrastructure and new voters to Nevada in 2008 was actually about Reid’s re-election campaign two years later.

He would need it. By the 2010 cycle, Reid’s unpopularity in Nevada was manifest—he was reviled in the rural areas and not beloved in Reno and its environs. He had a 50 percent disapproval rating in some polls. There would be no rural bus tour this time. His career was likely over, or so many thought.

Not me, though. I had seen his political death forecast before. The assumption that Reid was a political corpse led me to pen a series of columns for the Las Vegas Sun—I had joined the rival organization in 2000 after they offered me a job writing an e-mail newsletter and hosting a TV show—that facetiously began: “Harry Reid is dead, one in a series.” But his organization was now as multifaceted and redoubtable as any imaginable. And he had a plan: meddle in the GOP primary and either cost the favored Sue Lowden, a former television anchor and state senator, the nomination or make her vulnerable come the general election.

Every day— or so it seemed—Team Reid had some new meme to sell. If it wasn’t the campaign pushing the latest Angle gaffe, it was the Democratic Party, controlled by Reid, disgorging the latest research nugget. And they were surgical, too, choosing which gems to give to the national media and which to the locals. When Lowden made an infelicitous comment in the small town of Mesquite about bartering chickens for health care, a Democratic operative was there with a camera, and the video soon went viral. Then came the stunts—chicken suits, chicken websites, chicken puns. No campaign ever drove home a message as hard as Team Reid did. Patriot Majority, a third-party group run by an ex-Reid press secretary, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the air pounding Lowden.

And Lowden helped too—she turned out to be a disastrous candidate. The chickens for checkups remark would have killed her by itself, perhaps, but she was much better on paper than in person, and she was totally unprepared for Reid to meddle in her primary. When the insurgent Republican Sharron Angle won in a landslide in June, she had two disparate influences to thank: the conservative Club for Growth and Team Reid. The latter then spent the next six weeks defining Angle as outside the mainstream—she was of great assistance also—and by September the race essentially was over, even if the national media didn’t realize it yet.

The performances of both daily newspapers in Las Vegas were amazing to watch. The Las Vegas Review-Journal was nothing short of obsessed with defeating Reid, with both the publisher, Sherman Fredrick, and the editor, Tom Mitchell, openly anti-Reid. There was not even a nod to balance; this was an all-out war.

At one point, Reid joked to a newspaper official that he hoped the RJ would go out of business. He was kidding—or was he? Right after Reid won, Mitchell and Frederick were removed from their positions. No explanation was ever given, but many insiders speculated that the timing could not be coincidental. When you shoot to kill the king, or in this case Prince Harry, best not miss.

The Sun, where Reid’s late mentor, O’Callaghan, had always protected him, was all in. Greenspun, the scion of the family, met with me early in 2010 and told me he was dedicated to reelecting Reid. How far would he go? When Reid performed abominably in the final debate with Angle, I wrote how Reid had lost, with the headline, “Reid loses debate.” Greenspun called the editors and had it changed. (During the 2012 campaign, he also killed a column I wrote criticizing Reid for his Romney-didn’t-pay-taxes assault. I refused ever to write a column for him again.)

At a forum a few weeks ago, Greenspun went so far as to brag that the Sun had saved the country during the shutdown crisis by preserving Reid’s seat for him in 2010. Yes. That happened.

***

My relationship with Reid was good for many years after I was crossed off the blacklist. He came on my program, a nightly interview show that began on cable in 2001 and ascended to all three NBC affiliates in 2010, a few times a year and, as he does whenever he speaks back home, made news. We even had some fun. One time shortly after he had published his memoir, Searchlight: The Camp That Didn’t Fail, I put up the Amazon numbers that indicated it had sold more copies than my book about the 1998 governor’s race. Without missing a beat, Reid smiled, “That’s because I’m a better writer.”

I am now in a quiet period with the senator again. It could be argued that my June 2010 interview with Angle changed the race’s dynamics because I aggressively questioned her on some of her incendiary statements. Indeed, as she walked off the set, she turned around and said, “I bet some of that appears in ads for Reid.” She was right. But Reid doesn’t remember that. Indeed, Reid has not come on Ralston Reports since he submitted to an interview shortly after his reelection. And it has nothing to do with anything I have said or written about him, I have been told. Reid is fiercely protective of his family, especially his wife, Landra, but also his five children. I have written critical pieces about three of his children since Reid won reelection, and, I’m reliably told, he has not forgiven me for it.

He seems to be reveling in the twilight of his career, unconcerned about how he appears or what he says, even more so than usual.

The majority leader will probably let me out of the doghouse again one of these days, but I’m not holding my breath. He seems to be reveling in the twilight of his career, unconcerned about how he appears or what he says, even more so than usual. Just look at what he said during that tour of Nevada last week, making nasty comments about his same-state congressional colleagues. On the other hand, he continues to play the game as only he can, stroking Sandoval and sticking the knife in at the same time by touting the governor-who-might-want-to-be-senator’s embrace of Obamacare.

And Reid continues to move the pieces on the Nevada board, preparing to block the governor from running against him by going all in with Lucy Flores—the “demographically perfect” assemblywoman—in the lieutenant governor’s race. He cares because if the second in command is a Democrat, then Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval must stay—and will be blocked from challenging Reid in 2016. He is also, once again, meddling in a Republican primary. Reid does not want Sandoval’s anointed choice, a peripatetic, energized state senator named Mark Hutchison, to win the GOP nomination. So I expect the meddler-in-chief to find a way to help Hutchison’s opponent, someone he considers the weaker candidate and with whom he has some history.

That candidate’s name is Sue Lowden.

Lamar Alexander might think “End of the Senate” belongs on his tombstone, but I’d argue that if anyone’s should read, “No permanent friends, no permanent enemies,” it is Harry Reid’s.