Scott Dickensheets: Searchlight quiet despite maelstrom around Harry Reid

By Scott Dickensheets

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Dateline: Searchlight. Time stamp: Election morning. Assignment: Take a look around Harry Reid’s hometown.

“You’ll have to talk to the manager,” said the clerk at the Rebel gas and convenience store. She nodded toward a woman standing 4 feet away, silent, her back turned.

“She’ll have to talk to you,” the clerk explained. “She doesn’t like us to talk to the media about politics.”

The manager remained silent, her back turned.

“This being Harry Reid’s hometown and all ...” the clerk added.

Silent, back turned.

So, will she talk to me?

Silent, back turned.

Guess not.

They were more talkative across the highway, at Colton’s General Store: “I’m not interested, sorry,” a worker told me.

Hard to blame them, I suppose. Campaign fatigue must have set in long ago. Both the cradle of Reid’s can-do personal narrative and site of the Tea Party’s sock hop in March, Searchlight looms larger in 2010’s political consciousness than the tiny dot it makes on the map (about 45 miles southish of here). Ellie Shook, a member of the township’s board of advisers, said she was out the other day, “and up comes a reporter from Holland.” It’s been nutty like this for a while. “I think everyone will be glad when it’s over,” she told me with a good-natured laugh.

Election morning was a pleasant if breezy day. Clear skies, high 70s, but I didn’t see many people out. I drove to the edge of town, toward Cottonwood Cove. Ducked down a few side streets. No one. The park was empty. The boat supply store was closed.

More residents must’ve come out later. “We’re having a good turnout for a small community,” said Jill Canepa, another Searchlight Advisory Board member, when I got a hold of her a few hours later. She was just back from the voting booth. The mood, she said, was upbeat, people getting along whatever their politics in that way they do in small towns. Not that she wanted to talk about it. “I really don’t discuss politics with a lot of people,” she demurred.

You know who does? Diane Kendall. Searchlight native and local Realtor. Big-time Tea Partyer. She helped set up the Showdown in Searchlight in March, before which she wasn’t any kind of political activist. It made her someone, too. Now reporters call. Last week, she hosted a traveling contingent of foreign journalists curious about the election, from “Hungary, India, the Middle East, Africa ...”

The mood in town? “I believe the biggest majority of my friends and associates feel the way I do,” she said. “Not everyone does. There are a few Harry Reid supporters. I don’t see many.”

Asked why Reid’s hometown has turned on him, she runs down the Tea Party’s list of vague grievances: health care, taxes, socialism, the aloofness of a career politician versus the earthy character and pro-Constitution ideology of the challenger.

So, you don’t worry that replacing the third most powerful man in Washington with a newcomer will hurt the state?

“The state is going to benefit tremendously,” she insisted. “Sharron Angle is down to earth, she believes in small government and she wants what’s best for us.”

Political disagreements aside, you don’t think that Reid wants what’s best for —

“I’ve known Harry my entire life,” she said, “and I just disrespect the man. I don’t believe he gives a rat’s ass about us. There’s nothing I can tell you Harry Reid has done for this town.”

The four-lane highway between Las Vegas and Needles — that’s what Shook cited on Reid’s side of the ledger. She remembers when it was two-lane all the way. “We had some hellacious accidents,” she said, and believes Reid deserves some credit for the wider road. Shook doesn’t agree with the senator all down the line — he favors the giant wind-farm proposal nearby. She’ll fight it to the end. But she can set that aside. “I know what Harry Reid has done for Searchlight.”

She agrees that however hot their political passions, Searchlighters have mostly played it cool. “Oh yes, it’s been very polite,” she said. “Though there’s a few that are not.” She mentions Diane Kendall.

On my way out of town, past a falling-over shack, past a gold mine for sale, I stopped to look at the dirt stretch where the Tea Party rally took place in March. Trucks rumbled across it now; presumably, any scrim of right-wing lunacy left over from that frigid afternoon has been ground in or blown away.

I was there then, wrung out and cursing the three-hour crawl it took to leave (“If they can’t run a parking lot, how could they run a country?!”), trying to process the spectacle of 8,000 people, many receiving Social Security, Medicare or other assistance, successfully convincing themselves that they’ve been victimized by a government run amok, just like Sarah Palin told them they were.

“I don’t want to live in a country that’s going to socialism,” Kendall told me Tuesday, echoing what I’d heard endlessly at the rally. “And that’s where I believe this country is going.”

Some things a guy just can’t process. I put my car in gear and drove home.