WHEN HARRY MET NANCY OR HOW I AM MINORITY LEADER BUT WILL LOSE MY NEXT ELECTION

That’s the title of Sherman Frederick’s column. Mr. Frederick is predicting that Harry won’t win his next election in Nevada. Here’s his reasoning:

In 50-plus months, Nevada voters will march to the polls and replace Sen. Harry Reid, thus ending one of the longer, more powerful political runs in state history. When it happens, political wiseguys will remember that Sen. Reid’s undoing came early in his last term when he became a big shot in the Democratic Party and quickly morphed into someone Nevada voters did not recognize, his political girlfriend in the House, uber-liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

This is the same malady that afflicted Tom Daschle. With the rise of the alternative media, politicians can’t get away with speaking with a forked tongue anymore. John Thune exploited that in his winning campaign against Daschle. I’d suspect that whoever challenges Reid in 2010 will use the same tactic against Reid.

I have hiked the desert with “blue jeans” Harry and listened to him passionately expound the virtues of mining, advocate appropriate wilderness areas and unashamedly defend the absolute need for putting federally held land in and around Las Vegas into private hands.
I like that politically incorrect guy.
Then, I see some other fella on C-SPAN and “Meet the Press.” This other guy walks and talks like a lily-livered coward on terrorism, a crass political player on Social Security, a mute on abortion and family issues and Ted Kennedy on taxation. I don’t like that guy. And, I believe, most Nevadans are with me on that.
Nevadans who see Sen. Reid exercise his position as the Democratic leader of the Senate don’t see the hardscrabble conservative Mormon from Searchlight. They see a political transvestite who forsakes his home state to kowtow to the wildly liberal wing of the Democratic Party. When Harry meets Nancy on the national stage, they seem indistinguishable. Not because she’s him, but because him’s she.

This behavior won’t get noticed in California but this won’t play well in the red state of Nevada.