Reid this year launched an aggressive campaign against the Koch brothers. | AP Photos Hating on Harry Reid

DALLAS — A slew of big-name Republicans were in the house for this weekend’s summit of the Koch brothers’ leading political group, but the most talked-about figure may very well have been Harry Reid.

The Senate majority leader, who for months has been poking the Kochs in the eye, was omnipresent in the sections of the Dallas Omni Hotel blocked off by Americans for Prosperity for its summit. He was featured in videos, derided in speeches, jeered by activists and mockingly showcased in many a selfie — that last part thanks to a life-sized cutout of the Nevada Democrat at which passersby directed all manner of invective.


“It’s amazing that one guy can wreck so much,” declared one passerby. “Wrap his mouth in toilet paper,” another suggested. “How about some tea bag earrings?” said a third, pinching Reid’s earlobes as if piercing them.

( QUIZ: How well do you know the Koch brothers?)

The Reid jabs came so frequently at AFP’s eighth annual Defending the American Dream summit that this year’s edition might have been more appropriately dubbed “Hating on Harry Reid.”

While most of the swipes were civil and even good-humored, the antagonism underscores the deep feelings surrounding a personal clash that is shaping up as one of the defining battles of American politics headed into the 2014 midterms and perhaps beyond.

Reid this year launched an aggressive public relations crusade to brand the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, who sponsor a vast network of deep-pocketed conservative groups, as the new personification of a Republican Party that puts the interests of the rich over those of the middle class.

( Also on POLITICO: AFP Summit: 2016 prospects hone pitch to Koch donors, activists)

The strategy was widely panned — even by some fellow Democrats — as desperate, hypocritical and unlikely to yield dividends. But Reid has persisted, using the Senate floor and other platforms afforded by his position to launch attack after attack against the Kochs, whom he has called everything from “ un-American” to “ radical,” and whom he has accused of “actually trying to buy the country.” Others on the left have jumped on the anti-Koch bandwagon, creating an unusual dynamic in which one of the two major parties is waging a concerted election year campaign based partly on the vilification of two brothers who until recently were totally unknown and, even now, aren’t exactly household names.

The Kochs and their allies initially lashed back often, denouncing Reid’s attacks as “disrespectful and beneath the office he holds,” as well as “indicative of what lengths he and his Democratic allies will go to eliminate and silence their political opposition.” They’ve mostly pulled back from the attack-and-response cycle and suggest they’re ignoring Reid’s latest hits, but their political network has quietly ramped up its presence in Nevada, which will be deployed against Reid when he runs for reelection in 2016.

Dallas, however, proved that the Kochs and their allies aren’t simply content to hold their fire until 2016.

( Also on POLITICO: The Kochs' plan to beat Harry Reid)

Loud boos arose from the crowd of 3,000 activists gathered in a hotel ballroom when the summit’s opening general session kicked off with a video clip of Reid calling the Koch brothers “un-American” during a Senate floor speech.

Within minutes, in the first few lines of his introductory speech, AFP president Tim Phillips prompted more jeers when he name-checked Reid and, in a bit of understatement, declared him “not a big fan of Americans for Prosperity or David and Charles Koch, our good friends,” not to mention “just another bumbling failed liberal politician.”

Phillips regaled the crowd with a little Reid yarn — the moral of which seemed to be that the senator was a flagrant hypocrite whose societal worth was substantially less than that of the Koch brothers.

“Morning after morning, in his assault to finally end the 1 percent, Harry Reid leaves the Ritz-Carlton penthouse in Washington, D.C. where he lives,” Phillips said, referring to Reid’s one-bedroom condo on the second floor of the hotel’s residences, which Reid and his wife bought in 2001 for $750,000. Over chortles of knowing laughter, Phillips continued that Reid “goes down and hops in a chauffeured limousine — thank you, taxpayers, you cover that for him. … He drives to the Senate floor to launch attack after attack after attack.”

Affecting a tone of moderate disbelief, Phillips ticked off some of Reid’s greatest hits for the crowd: “Words like ‘evil’ … slurs like ‘un-American.’ Here’s the irony — David and Charles Koch create more prosperity for more Americans in one year than a career politician like Harry Reid creates in a lifetime.”

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As applause rippled through the hall, Phillips continued: “The American people have caught on, too. They know how disastrous his policies are and how failing his leadership is. And you get the feeling, don’t you? You get the feeling that one day soon, Harry Reid is going to join Nancy Pelosi as a former majority leader in the United States Congress.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, one of a handful of prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidates who spoke to the crowd, repeatedly used Reid’s name as a punch line, grinning mischievously after the crowd booed his first mention of “Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats.”

“You know — oddly enough — they get that reception everywhere they go,” he cracked. But he really worked the crowd into a frenzy with a raucous, preacher-like call to action in which he accused Reid of “ignoring the national security priorities of this country,” and then systemically ticked through the constitutional amendments that most excite conservatives, suggesting that Reid wanted to do away with each.

“If you believe in the First Amendment, vote Harry Reid out,” Cruz said. “If you support the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, then vote Harry Reid out! … If you support the fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to privacy, vote Harry Reid out! … If you support the Tenth Amendment and want to repeal every word of Common Core, then vote Harry Reid out!” he continued, to mounting applause and shouts of “Amen!”

Just outside the hall, a stream of activists took the chance to vent their own anti-Reid sentiments at the life-size Reid cutout, positioned for much of the conference in front of a blue backdrop bearing AFP’s distinctive torch logo. Mounted on foam board, the Reid cutout was made from a photo of the senator, clad in a dark suit, arms crossed defiantly, head cocked with a somewhat smug grin on his face as he looks off into the distance.

“Just look at that photo — stern, imperious, in charge — everything you think of when you think about Harry Reid,” said Michael Neubert, a Presbyterian pastor from Herrin, Illinois, who had someone snap a picture as he posed with foam-board Harry, flashing rabbit ears behind the cutout’s head. “It’s absurd for [Reid] to single [the Kochs] out. To call them un-American is un-American,” said Neubert, adding he intended to send the photo to his wife and also to post it on Facebook “for my Republican friends.”

He wasn’t the only one with the idea. At some points, there was a wait to snap photos with foam-board Harry, who attracted even more attention than a similar cutout of GOP icon Ronald Reagan — looking suave in a tan suit — positioned nearby. Popular poses with foam-board Harry — usually struck with a smile — included grasping his head, or pretending to sock him in the kisser.

“Launch him,” urged one activist as another picked up Harry to reposition him for a better photographic angle.

Eventually, some AFP staff appeared to grow concerned by the spectacle and began hiding the cutout behind the blue backdrop, though invariably some activist would spot it and move it back out into the open for another photo.

“I think it gives us a bad name for him to be there,” an Austin field director for AFP told someone who had just snapped a photo, as the field director again removed foam-board Harry from plain sight. “I just don’t think he should stay there. He’s already come out a couple times, so people keep finding him.”

Phillips said foam-board Harry was just a gag intended to be in good fun.

It’s apparently not a new gag, nor one that the Kochs’ allies thought would appeal only to grass-roots activists.

At the network’s exclusive closed-door annual summer major donor seminar in June at the St. Regis hotel in Dana Point, California, organizers from the umbrella Koch outfit Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce erected a different life-sized foam-board cutout of Reid. In that one, a khaki-and-shirt-sleeves-clad Reid had his arms spread and his mouth agape as if in midspeech. Emanating from it was a cartoonlike quote bubble with the word “Un-American.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard him say the words ‘un-American,’ but we’re going to put this up on the terrace,” lead Koch fundraiser Kevin Gentry told the assembled donors at one point, according to a secret recording obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor. “If you want your picture taken with Harry Reid at the, uh, St. Regis … you can do that.”

That cutout was the object of derision, even among super-wealthy donors, said an attendee. “These donors are competitive, and competitive people like to see the competition. They get fired up by competition.”

A Koch brothers spokesman declined to comment on the undercurrent of enmity for Reid in Dallas. And David Koch, in brief remarks to activists did not mention Reid, only going so far as to warn that “disastrous polices by the current administration and inaction by a powerful few up on Capitol Hill threaten our already fragile economy.”

There could be ample opportunity to get in a dig at a forthcoming AFP summit. Not only does Reid show no signs of standing down from his war on the Kochs, but among the sites AFP is said to be considering for future Defending the American Dream summits is Reid’s new hometown of Las Vegas.