The author takes issue with criticism of Harry Reid's choice to live in a luxury apartment. The GOP farce

A terrible confession: I live in the same apartment building in Washington as Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader is under attack by his opponent, Sharron Angle, and by the National Republican Senatorial Committee for — among other sins — “living large” in a “spectacular” luxury apartment in D.C. while his constituents back in Nevada are suffering from the worst of the housing bust.

Although I’ve never actually spotted Reid in the lobby, I did once see Michael Jordan, who used to live there, which is almost as exciting. Nevertheless, I put “spectacular” in quotes because there’s nothing particularly spectacular about this building. But I won’t deny that it’s very, very nice. And so what? I thought that Republicans believed in letting people enjoy the fruits of their labor. I thought that my party, the Democrats, were the ones who stood accused of stirring up resentments and trafficked in invidious distinctions. I didn’t realize that there’s been a surprise reversal in the class war, and it is now against Republican orthodoxy to live in an expensive apartment — especially an expensive apartment in Washington — even if that’s where your job is. (Imagine what Republicans could make of it if Reid stayed in Nevada all the time, playing the slots to aid the local economy, when he ought to be here in D.C. cutting your taxes and so on.)


You would think that curiosity alone, if not caution, might dictate that before making a big stink about where the Senate majority leader lives, it would be prudent for the NRSC and/or the Angle campaign to find out where the Senate minority leader lives when he has the misfortune to be in Washington. But this — to me — fascinating question apparently did not even come up as Angle and the Republican apparatchiks were planning their attacks on Reid. Or if it did occur to someone, nobody thought it mattered. Because it turns out that Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “live[s] in a Capitol Hill three-bedroom with carriage house,” according to WhoRunsGov.com., a website owned by The Washington Post. Zillow.com, the real estate website, estimates the value of McConnell’s hoof-à-terre at $1,142,000, which is about $80,000 more than Reid’s Bedroom of Shame.

Many Republican senators outdo Reid in the real estate department. Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, for example, once ran for president wearing only a red plaid flannel shirt. (I mean, this was the only kind of shirt he wore, not that he didn’t wear other things, at least most of the time, as I recall.) The plaid shirt was supposed to symbolize Alexander’s mystical connection to the people and his rejection of elitism. Now he owns a townhouse in Georgetown. Yes, that’s right, in Georgetown, the heart of the heart of evil, where liberals go to get plastered and dream up wicked new ways to take away our freedom. Zillow says Chateau Lamar is worth more than $2 million. Alabama’s Richard Shelby also prefers Georgetown. His house there is just a half-block from the mansion of late Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham. Zillow says it’s worth $900,500. Mississippi’s Thad Cochran lives on Capitol Hill in a house worth $1,373,500. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the noisier phony populists in the Senate, has a Capitol Hill pad worth $1,001,000.

Why does any of this matter? It doesn’t, but Angle and the Republicans brought it all up. From the fact that Reid has an expensive apartment, they’ve weaved a narrative, entirely farcical and almost entirely false, aimed at stirring up populist passions in a way that violates their own core principles and distracts voters from the emptiness of their agenda. In Reid, they’ve found a perfect foil. What is the opposite of charisma? Whatever it is, Reid has got it. However, so does McConnell, so we may have that to look forward to.

On the Republican Senate website, there are pictures of Reid with a goofy smile, cheek to cheek with an attractive blonde the Republicans helpfully identify as a “supermodel.” They imply that this is just the beginning of a typical wild evening in Gomorrah-on-the-Potomac. “Take me, Harry,” she says. “I want to be earmarked.” Or something like that. (Hey, the guy’s got a small apartment on the second floor — an obvious babe magnet.) There’s another picture of Reid and the arms of an unidentified black woman in what is described as a “conga line” but looks more like “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” The arms — as reported by Ben Smith of POLITICO — are actually those of Michelle Obama. (Hey, Harry, who was that first lady I saw you with last night?)

Another clip on the NRSC website features Reid at a “lavish boat race fundraiser.” Once again, you would suppose that unless irony is completely dead, someone at the NRSC would have checked, you know, just to make sure that all Republican fundraising had remained safely on terra firma. Well, irony, it seems, is dead. If the Republicans had taken the precaution of checking, they might have discovered that staffers of the tea party (true, not quite the same thing as the Republican Party — yet) had campaigned around Alaska on a luxury ocean liner. Tickets went for $1,499 and entitled the staffers to complimentary fresh fruit on request, fresh flowers, 100 percent Egyptian cotton towels, shoeshine services and high-end body lotions from Elemis Aroma. If they had discovered this in time, they could have avoided any mockery of Reid for fundraising on a boat. But that really would not have been necessary. There would have been no mockery. No one minds if you accuse the other side of doing things that your side does, too. Issues like this one come prepackaged, one size fits all.

Meanwhile, the mystery of Reid and the supermodel continues. Is it the Elemis Aroma that makes Harry’s appeal to women so effective? Henry Kissinger famously said that power was the best aphrodisiac, which is sad for Reid, since he may be about to lose his. But Kissinger, according to my sources, never tried body lotions. Or at least he never talked about them. National security, I guess.

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for POLITICO. The founder of Slate, Kinsley has also served as editor of The New Republic, editor-in-chief of Harper’s, editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for The Atlantic.