Herding the Democrats

By DOUGLAS WALLER

Harry Reid is the kind of adversary who might just wear you down. Last year, for example, the Nevada Senator staged a one-day filibuster, standing on the Senate floor and talking for eight hours and 35 minutes straight to put majority leader Bill Frist hopelessly behind schedule on other bills that he wanted to rush through before the Thanksgiving recess. Reid planned everything carefully, down to his diet. So he wouldn't be forced to go to the bathroom and lose his right to the floor, he ate only a slice of wheat bread and a handful of unsalted peanuts for breakfast, kept Senate pages from refilling the water glass at his desk and made sure he sipped only half of it during the day.

That tenacity was on display the morning after Election Day as Reid, 64, lined himself up to succeed South Dakota's Tom Daschle as the Senate minority leader, a job Reid is expected to secure this week. Having worked the phones, Reid, who as Democratic whip was Daschle's top lieutenant as well as his loyal friend for the past six years, had promises of support from a majority of next year's 44 Senate Democrats two hours after Daschle publicly conceded his seat to Republican John Thune. That enabled Reid to easily fend off a challenge from Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who was also interested in the job.

Reid, more conservative than Daschle and many other Democrats, is antiabortion and has voted against an assault-weapons ban. But with a Westerner's quiet style and meticulous attention to detail, he has built alliances across the political spectrum during his 17 years in the Senate. "The biggest strength he has is that he always keeps his word," says liberal Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. Reid keeps note cards in his coat pocket to jot down favors requested by colleagues who buttonhole him--and to record when they're done. A skilled legislative tactician who practically camps out on the Senate floor, Reid was Daschle's point man for secretly convincing Vermont's other Senator, James Jeffords, to ditch the Republican Party in 2001 and vote with Democrats as an independent. "He's a straight shooter, smart and easy to work with," says Senate Republican whip Mitch McConnell. "Having said that, I also know he can be a tough opponent."

George W. Bush knows it as well, which was why he phoned the Senator in Nevada the morning after Election Day to begin building a rapport. Reid ducked press calls last week, but he made it clear in an interview with TIME before the election that the President should not expect a honeymoon if he won a second term. "I don't think he has a lot of respect in the Senate among Democrats," said Reid, who hasn't forgotten the hardball legislative tactics Bush and Senate Republicans used in his first term, like shutting Democratic leaders out of negotiations to craft the prescription-drug and Medicare-reform bill Congress passed.

The son of a hard-drinking gold miner who eventually shot and killed himself, Reid grew up in the town of Searchlight, 54 miles south of Las Vegas, in a tiny wood shack with a tin roof. He boarded with a family to attend high school in Henderson, 40 miles away, and he later went to college with money chipped in by Henderson townsfolk. Once an amateur boxer, he worked nights as a Capitol Hill police officer to pay for law school at George Washington University. As chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981, Reid, a devout Mormon, battled organized crime's control of Vegas casinos and contended with threats as well as a bomb placed in his wife's car that police defused.

Now his challenge is herding a group of Democratic Senators whose number is set to dwindle to 44 from the current 48. Lest he suffer the same fate as Daschle, he must balance his role as a partisan with the fact that he represents a state that Bush won, albeit narrowly. Reid also can't ignore that other Democratic Senators from Bush states--such as Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bill Nelson of Florida--will be up for re-election in 2006 and don't want to be picked off either. Democratic Senators say Reid plans to choose his fights carefully, perhaps letting a compromise on tort reform go through, for example, but battling fiercely if Bush tries to privatize parts of Social Security.

A consummate Senate insider, Reid has largely shunned the cameras, and one senior Senate Democratic aide is worried that he "doesn't have a strong TV personality." But Reid has been consulting regularly with imagemaker Jim Margolis, who produced some of the most powerful TV ads for John Kerry during the primaries, and Reid plans to add media experts to his staff, showing once again his determination to rise to the task at hand.