The pros and cons of the nexus of Reid and Obama

By Jon Ralston

Friday, July 9, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

Harry Reid is alive, one in an occasional series:

One month after the primary, with nary a day without an attack ad or a bad Angle pun or a new Social Security description, the U.S. Senate campaign has been unrelenting. If nothing else has been accomplished by the ever-ruthless, ever-scorching Reid Machine, it is to change conventional wisdom so that instead of calls from national media asking me how the Senate majority leader can win, the question is more likely to be: Does Sharron Angle have any chance?

(Answer: Yes. Still much Reidhate coursing through the body politic, although Angle may prove to be the antidote to a virus that has reached near-epidemic proportions.)

So a quarter of the way through the general election season, with few employees at the National Republican Senatorial Committee left with any hair, the metamorphosis of Angle from Tea Party heroine to GOP Senate nominee has been as bumpy as a skateboard ride through the Mojave. It’s as if she has tried to tiptoe back to the middle and every step of the way detonated a land mine planted by the Reid ambushers.

And yet, Angle, despite the brutal missteps, the vicious lampooning and the rhetorical contortions, still is in a dead heat (or thereabouts) with the most powerful Nevadan there ever was. That is astonishing, is it not?

That dynamic helps explain why President Barack Obama is preparing for the second day of his Southern Nevada sojourn, like a doctor flown in on a very fancy Flight for Life jet and remembering the famous words that evolved from the Hippocratic oath. But can Obama do no harm as he tends to an ailing friend named Harry Reid, or is the president less part of the cure than more of the disease considering his numbers here are only slightly better than Reid’s?

With Angle administering Second Amendment remedies to her foot on almost a daily basis, the Obama visit ensures that some wavering voters, frightened by Angle’s positions translated by the Reid campaign, may fall back into the GOP line. At least for now, that is.

The calculated gamble by the majority leader’s campaign is that the president will rally the base and fill Reid’s campaign coffers, so any turning off independents or reinforcement of the Obama-Reid nexus is offset. Maybe.

(Just in case, make sure no one uses any Martha Coakley or Arlen Specter analogies while Obama is here.)

The benefits are obvious. Obama not only can rain money and prestige down on Reid, but he essentially has put his entire Cabinet at Reid’s disposal. Two of them — Interior’s Ken Salazar and Energy’s Steven Chu — were here Thursday to make the case that, with the passing of Robert Byrd, the majority leader is now the King of Pork.

This is the delicate dance Reid is trying to execute during the Year of D.C. Disgust. He is the indispensable inside player inside a place everyone loves to hate, securing money and benefits for his home state, but hoping no one notices he lives at the Ritz-Carlton, consorts with the likes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and has been in the Club of 100 for two dozen years.

If ever there were a poster boy for the roiling electorate to rally against, it is Harry Reid — and there are plenty who wouldn’t vote for him if he went door to door handing out $10,000 checks. That’s how sulfurous the political atmosphere is for him — almost anybody could defeat him.

Almost.

In the month since she won the primary, shocking a GOP establishment she had forever shunned, Angle has tried to assimilate with the help of some D.C. sculptors who have not found her easy to remold. Her problem is that she is suffering from a strange form of schizophrenia featuring a different Billy Joel on each shoulder. One is singing “Just the Way You Are” in one ear while another is warbling “Uptown Girl” in the other.

Sharron Angle is a lot of things, but she is no slick product from GOP central casting. And the more she tries to please her new D.C. friends, the more she risks a worse fate than being labeled dangerous or extreme: being labeled a shape-shifting — and this is the worst word of all for her followers — politician.

The state of the race was brilliantly summed up by one of my regular correspondents, one who still communicates by postcard in the 21st century, and who wrote: “Nevada’s 2010 Senate contest seems to have boiled down to one candidate who can’t stop throwing votes away vs. the other who tries to buy every vote still breathing.”

Exactly. And four more months to enjoy the spectacle.