I’ll bet you the left side of John Bolton’s moustache and half of his nose hairs that if you go back and read the original stories about Harry Reid’s ascension to Minority Leader you’ll be struck by one thing: Reid has been a big surprise.
When Reid took over from the voter-banished Tom Daschle, the conventional wisdom seemed to be “Here’s this nice, boring, behind the scenes politician who isn’t media savvy and can be no match for the Republicans or White House. He’s a caretaker until someone better comes along.”
Instead, Reid has become the bane of the GOP, and the hero of Democrats. The reasons: he seems to have an acute sense of political timing and, with several notable exceptions, knows how to use sound bytes effectively.
When Republicans throw down the gauntlet, Reid is proving to be a political leader who quickly picks it up and hurls it back — but only after waiting until exactly the right moment to do it.
For instance, we now have his latest on the John Bolton nomination:
Senate Democrats will not allow a vote on President Bush’s choice for U.N. ambassador unless the White House hands over records of communications intercepts Bolton sought from the secretive National Security Agency, Minority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday.
“You can’t ignore the Senate. We’ve told them what we’ve wanted. The ball is in his court,” Reid, D-Nevada, told CNN. “If they want John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, give us this information. If they don’t, there will be no Bolton.”
That’s pretty definitive: (a)the Senate can’t be ignored, (b) the Senate isn’t getting what it asked for, (c)the onus is on the White House. And just look at the timing of the remark:
The Senate fell four votes shy of the 60 needed to cut off debate on Bolton’s nomination in May after two Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee urged their colleagues to hold the issue open.
Sens. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the committee, and Christopher Dodd have demanded the Bush administration produce documents 10 National Security Agency communications intercepts that Bolton, the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control, had requested since 2001.
White House Communications Director Nicole Devenish called Reid’s stance “another effort to distract from the work that the people want to see done here in Washington.”
“This request for additional information is clearly a stalling tactic, and one that I think the American people are growing weary of,” she said.
But Reid said Bush is responsible for breaking the impasse — not Democrats.
“The president is obstructing a vote on John Bolton,” he said. “We’ve asked for simple information that Congresses over many decades that we have been in existence have been given by the White House.”
So Reid waited until just the right moment to make his comment, sparking a pro-forma response from the White House — which did not address in its reply why the info hasn’t been delivered or any possible objections it has to it. So if Bolton’s nomination remains stalled Reid and other Demmies can now point to the White House and the nondelivery of the info. It’ll be hard for Reid to be labeled merely an obstructionist on this one — unless the White House can come up with a compelling reason why the info can’t be delivered ASAP.
Bottom line: Reid is actually proving to be a more canny foe for the GOP and the White House than Daschle. Few predicted that or that he’d be able to hold Democrats in line as well as he has. So far he has proven to be a skillful tactical leader. It’s still too early to tell if he’s proving to be a good strategical leader.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.