Reid fighting for Berkley and to keep majority in Senate

By Karoun Demirjian

Sunday, June 26, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

People in Nevada have long known that if you cross Harry Reid politically, you’d better expect to be crossed back.

This past week was a reminder of that, as Reid unleashed a razor-tongued dressing down of Democratic Senate candidate Byron Georgiou. He lied to me, Reid essentially said, about his finances and about his ethics, and that’s why I regret ever having appointed him to the financial commission that gave him his political wings. And of course the election has something to do with it.

It’s an introduction that definitely propelled Georgiou, mostly unknown outside Las Vegas and California, into the national limelight. But the episode may have revealed more about Reid than about Georgiou.

The question, really, is: Why so much hate, Harry?

It’s not just that Rep. Shelley Berkley is his pick. It’s that for Reid, this is an extremely personal fight.

Last year, Reid may have been fighting for his political life, but this year, he’s fighting for his political quality of life: He has to keep Democrats in the majority to maintain his leadership.

Democrats have identified Nevada as their No. 1 pick-up opportunity, and the longer Democrats in Massachusetts go without naming a challenger to Republican Scott Brown, the more exclusive that list becomes.

Given that he’s only got a three-seat window, it isn’t going to be easy. Of the eight Senators who have already announced they’ll be retiring at the end of the 112th Congress, six are Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents, three from states whose Senate elections have recently swung.

Add the 17 others seeking re-election, and Reid’s got a potential mess on his hands.

But if Reid knows how to win squeakers anywhere, it’s in Nevada, and part of his strategy is to keep things close to home.

Reid came under fire in his nail-biter of a re-election race for being “out of touch” with the state, and all his talk of Searchlight couldn’t silence critics who accused him of caring more about Washington than Washoe.

Of course, Berkley’s been in Washington for over a decade too. And Reid didn’t come out with an endorsement early on: He waited, and watched, as Kate Marshall, Catherine Cortez Masto and Ross Miller all mused about candidacies, only joining the national Democrats in giving Berkley a big unveiling in April when they were sure her foot-dragging was losing them precious campaigning time.

The two left vying for the Democratic nomination have things in common. They’re both wealthy. Both have ancestral roots in Greece. They’re both tied to Las Vegas, without much of a footprint in the northern parts of the state.

But Berkley has deeper roots in the state, as does the Republican to beat. She’s a six-term Congresswoman with a life-size Liberace cut-out in her office; a different style than third-term Republican Dean Heller’s mounted elk’s head, but still quite native.

Georgiou, on the other hand, is running as a self-described “outsider.” And despite the local businesses he’s invested in, the jobs he’s created and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’s donated to Reid’s efforts inside and outside the Silver State since he arrived in 2005, he doesn’t appear to have been able to convince the state’s senior Democratic statesman that he belongs in the Nevada in-crowd.

Berkley, for her part, is remaining uncharacteristically silent as Reid goes to the rhetorical mat against her chief competitor. When asked about the situation, all she’ll say is: “I’m going to run my campaign.”