Senate Leader Harry Reid faces tough re-election

SEARCHLIGHT, Nev. – Along a curve of desert highway near the gated home of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, mechanic Bill Johnson is struggling to keep his checkbook balanced.

With Nevada’s economy poisoned by recession and the nation’s highest foreclosure and bankruptcy rates, business at Johnson’s boat-repair shop has nose-dived 40 percent since last year. He cannot afford health insurance, and his sewer bill jumped to $875 a year.

“I really have to pose a question: Harry, what have you done for me lately?” asks Johnson, who vows to vote against Reid and other incumbents unless health care is made affordable.

Johnson’s exasperation demonstrates the problems Reid faces as he runs for a fifth term next year in a political climate made treacherous by Nevada’s economic turmoil and his high-profile role in pushing President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Never a particularly beloved figure in Nevada despite a public career that dates to the 1960s, Reid has been derided as out of touch with Main Street and out of step with Nevada’s moderate politics. Many Republicans consider him one of the most vulnerable incumbents on Capitol Hill.

A veteran of close elections, Reid is leaving nothing to chance. He is already airing TV ads and is about halfway to his goal of raising $25 million for the race, an unprecedented amount for Nevada. He raised $7 million in 2004.

Reid has recruited a long line of party luminaries to help raise money and polish his image, including Obama. Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a $2,400-a-plate fundraiser in Reno and credited Reid with helping push through the $787 billion stimulus package.

The 69-year-old Reid, a miner’s son who worked his way through law school, tells voters he has the clout to make a difference in their lives. And he has a long record of proving doubters wrong: He has been a state legislator, lieutenant governor, congressman and four-term senator. He has been majority leader since 2007.

But even here, where Reid is both a celebrity and neighbor, there are complaints about his politics and his often dour and prickly personality, confirming polls showing that the most powerful Democrat in the Senate is not necessarily a hero at home.

The risks he faces were demonstrated all too clearly in 2004, when Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, was defeated for re-election.

Across Route 95 in a dimly lighted casino, Jeff Collins sips a long-neck beer and talks about friends still jobless despite billions in stimulus spending. The ticket-splitting Democrat, one of 400,000 voters who have flooded into Nevada since Reid’s last race in 2004, considers the majority leader far removed from the anxiety in the state.

Would he send Reid back for a fifth term?

“It’s kind of like voting for the lesser of two evils,” says Collins, who is eager to consider new faces.

A field of Republican rivals is emerging, though party leaders in Washington failed to enlist their favored pick, Rep. Dean Heller. Among the potential GOP nominees: Sue Lowden, a former Miss America contestant and one-time leader of the state Republican Party, and Danny Tarkanian, son of former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian.

Earlier this month, a voter survey published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., found Reid trailing both Republicans in potential matchups.

Reid dismisses the unfavorable polling with trademark brevity: “All my polling numbers are fine.”

Reid takes credit for bringing jobs and development to Nevada, a claim even some Republicans concede. At the same time, he acknowledges it hasn’t been enough. The state’s unemployment rate is at a record 13.3 percent.

“I know that people in Nevada are struggling,” Reid says in one TV ad.

There’s little doubt Reid’s political standing is being undercut partly by the nation’s sour mood. Surveys show voters are dissatisfied with incumbents of all stripes.

Reid, a Mormon, is conservative on gun control, opposes abortion rights and is a friend of mining and casino interests. But he also has strong ties to unions and a green streak that has made him unpopular with ranchers and farmers.

Reid’s stewardship of Obama’s agenda, including the stimulus legislation, environmental protection and health care reform, will inevitably test his ties with those who disagree with the president’s direction.

“Any time you have to be the face and voice of national issues when they are fairly controversial, there is obviously the possibility of alienating some people who would otherwise support you,” says Frank Schreck, a Nevada lawyer who was a fundraiser for Bill Clinton. “It’s a problem any leader in Congress has.”

Still, Nevada’s Republicans have their own problems. The Democratic Party holds a registration edge of 110,000 — a gap that is growing. Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons has been dogged by scandal, and Republican Sen. John Ensign is fending off calls for his resignation following disclosure of a 2008 affair with former campaign aide.

Reid has lined up a list of prominent Republican supporters, including casino mogul Steve Wynn and influential political consultant Sig Rogich.

Reid’s supporters point out he led the fight to stop the nation’s nuclear waste dump from being located in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, and pushed through a bill that resulted in the state receiving more than $3 billion since 1998 from the sale of federal land.

“To think about losing Harry Reid at this time, with his ability to help the state, is just ludicrous,” Rogich says.

There’s almost no sign that the challenges of re-election are undermining Reid’s work as leader of the Senate’s 58 Democrats and two independents.

His prospects of winning re-election are intertwined with getting a health care bill through Congress, the most complex political task he has ever undertaken.

The long slog involves nightly meetings with White House officials and endless conversations with recalcitrant senators. Reid is careful in public remarks to note he supports a public option — a bow to Nevadans who favor a government-run insurance alternative. On Monday, he said the bill he will bring to the Senate floor will include an option for government-run insurance, but states will be allowed to opt out of it.

Rodger Hinds, 51, whose family has roots in Searchlight dating to the 1950s, credits the senator with bringing jobs to Las Vegas. But Hinds, a Republican who knows Reid, also blames him for environmental rules that he says pushed ranchers out of work.

“I believe he failed the town he grew up in,” says Hinds, who is undecided in the 2010 contest. “I thought he was a regular guy. He talked to everybody. He had time for everybody. But he doesn’t anymore.”

Alinskyite in Chief Is a Master Polarizer

The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
– Saul Alinsky, the Father of Community Organizing

Rules for Radicals; p. 128

There’s a whole lot of polarizing going on in Obama’s America. Unity is out, apparently. Polarization is still in. And Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are the new Bush.

One would need to be a complete ninny outfitted with blinders and earplugs not to know this by now.

One blaring truth rears its ugly head to any open-minded person who takes a hard look at Barack Obama’s personal and political history. His history is shot clear through with polarizing effects, both intentional and unintentional.

One might almost say that Barack Obama was a born polarizer.

Obama’s Polarization Roots

When Barack Obama burst upon the national political stage with his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was selling himself as an ideal-Republic American. Yes, as is typical of all of Obama’s speeches, this one was heavy on the “I.” Nevertheless, the speech heard ‘round the world at that convention was one just about any American anywhere could like.

The most memorable lines and the ones that drew the heaviest applause:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Unfortunately for the Country, these were indeed just words.

As researchers came to learn during the campaign, Barack Obama was raised on the mother’s milk of socialism, not the bedrock American values claimed by the Axelrod-spun, fairytale narrative.

Both Barack’s mother and his father were fellow travelers of the Marxist band and made no bones about this during their lives. Stanley Ann Dunham was spouting the “gospel of envy” by the time she was in her mid-teens. Barack Obama Sr. saw his own political career in Kenya die out, not only due to his alcoholism, but also due to his hard-core communist fealties, which were too stringent for the softer-core socialists in command of the fledgling post-colonial country of his birth. Young Barack’s grandfather, who was his primary caregiver from age 10, made sure the youngster spent vast amounts of his free time with stalwart avowed communist, Frank Marshall Davis.

At their very core, all Marxist theories rest upon polarization, which is the direct result of envy and greed for power. “They have what we want,” is the rallying cry of all socialist/communist/fascist systems. All Marxist creeds are as naturally polarizing as a mob of looters.

Fancy, high-flying words don’t change a thing.

When Barack Obama made his way to Chicago, he was already a natural polarizer, seeing the world through us-vs.-them lenses. His associations with ACORN (Project Vote) and Jeremiah Wright fit perfectly with the worldview his parents, grandfather and mentor purposefully taught him.

His study of Alinsky power tactics during those years merely reinforced that polarizing worldview and gave it stronger legs.

The church chosen by Barack Obama in Chicago was run by Jeremiah Wright, another active and vociferous polarizer. Wright based his own theology on the writings of James H. Cone, a man who boastfully declares that blacks — not Jews — are the chosen people of God, that they’re due special preference because of their history of oppression and that the only way a white person can join them is to shed their “white skins” and become black in their souls. Both Cone and Wright preach black supremacy and black separatism and have bought hook, line and sinker the socialist, “They have what we want,” rallying cry. Barack Obama chose this theology of his own free will as a full-fledged, well-educated adult.

As a young politician in Chicago, Obama was known for sowing division and polarity among his own constituents, first with his underhanded treatment of Alice Palmer, then with his ill-fated challenge of Bobby Rush for the U.S. Congress.

Why would anyone believe that Barack Obama had a single unifying bone in his body? Such a belief defies common sense.

The Master Polarizer as President

President Barack Obama sailed into the presidency itself on the wings of eight years of solid, left-wing manipulated polarizing of all things Bush. So, why did Americans believe Obama would be anything but a polarizing president? David Mendell, writing in his book, From Promise to Power, puts his finger right on the pulse of Obama’s ease with bamboozling all comers.

It’s the smooth-flowing, used-car-salesman rhetoric, honey.

Writing of Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign, Mendell noted (p. 248):

“As he had so often before, Obama sold his message to both liberals and centrists, as well as to some who tilted toward the right. His message, after all, was both liberal and conservative. His policy positions were decidedly to the left, but he offered them in such a passive, two-pronged way that it made him sound almost conservative.”

After becoming president, Obama’s first target of Alinsky polarization tactics was Rush Limbaugh. The targeting began very early with Obama’s words to Republican lawmakers over the hastily passed, non-bipartisan Stimulus package. When Republican lawmakers attempted to take the new President at his conciliatory campaign rhetoric and provide actual input, the President’s petulant reply: “I won.” To which he added the polarizing bait: “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get anything done.”

Obama, the general threw down the rhetorical gauntlet and ever since, his troops have followed suit, attempting to polarize Rush Limbaugh (and every one of Rush’s listeners) in the same way Democrats effectively polarized President Bush.

President Obama followed up on his polarizing tactic against Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Dinner, laughing uproariously as Wanda Sykes plied her death-wish humor at Rush’s kidneys and ludicrously suggested that Rush was the 20th hijacker on 9/11.

According to the Huffington Post, “The White House’s communications staff announced this week (referring to Oct 5-9) that it was charting out a new, more aggressive strategy, defined largely by a pledge to push back hard against news stories that are either inaccurate or unflattering.” Anita Dunn appeared the following Sunday on CNN to fire the first salvo of this stated policy.

Since then, our Alinskyite in Chief has taken the unprecedented extra step of using the people’s government to perform a rhetorical hit job on an independent media outlet, Fox News. Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, whose favorite philosopher is Mao, the Chinese-Communist butcher, audaciously targeted Fox News on national television. She slandered the channel’s coverage of the presidential campaign, declared it a “wing of the Republican Party,” and openly admitted the reason it was dissed by the President last month was its tenacious insistence on reporting stories unflattering to Obama.

This open polarizing of independent news and opinion broadcasters is not by accident, but by design and rests solidly at the feet of the President. Dunn made it big in the news again this week for her declarations that Obama had controlled the media during the campaign. But this control of the media thing only works if one controls all the media.

The Goals of Alinskyite Polarization: Killing the Opposition

Saul Alinsky declared that the only way to effect any substantial change in the prevailing order of power (Haves vs. Have-nots) was to first polarize the whole societal/political atmosphere.

Alinsky described his community organizer as someone who must become a “well-integrated political schizoid.”

“The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.” (Rules for Radicals; p. 78)

When Senate candidate Obama gave that speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and declared, “even as we speak, there are those preparing to divide us,” he was talking out both sides of his mouth.

Being a consummate divider is the community organizer’s very job description. His task is to “rub raw the sores of discontent” until ordinary people become so agitated with the status quo that they are willing to do whatever is necessary to change it. When Alinsky was taunted with the accusation that organizers were nothing but “professional agitators,” he gleefully agreed, declaring that the organizer’s job was to “fan the flames of discontent.” Only hopelessness and overwhelming fear of the future, he contended, that would pave the way for revolution:

Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. – Rules for Radicals, p. xix

That’s precisely where we were in the lead-up to the presidential election. Americans were indeed “rubbed raw” from the left’s ceaseless caterwauling against Bush, the “religious right,” “ideological” policy making, “Bush’s war,” etc. And it has been clear from the beginning of the Obama presidency that he and his supporters believed enacting far-reaching leftist policies would be little more than child’s-play. After all, the President also had overwhelming majorities in Congress to do his bidding.

But things have not gone as easily or as uncritically as hoped. Resistance has formed and it has been widespread and quite resilient against the President’s charms. Rather than re-examine his policy proposals or question himself, President Obama simply goes to the fallback position of every true-blue Alinskyite. He “picks a target, freezes it, personalizes it and polarizes it.”

In the President’s mind, the only reason good Americans disagree with him and his far-reaching, anti-American policies are those media folks who report on his scheming, i.e., Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. The other news and opinion outlets have given the Alinskyite a complete pass.

Alinsky taught that the purpose of polarization was not only to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” but also to force the target into committing the “crimes” of which he stood preemptively accused. Alinsky gave examples of how he had polarized and tormented an opponent so forcefully and tenaciously that the target eventually broke and succumbed to things like breaking into his offices to get information and hurling invective that made him look guilty to onlookers. The whole idea of polarization is to push the target into becoming the villain he was targeted to be.

Alinsky summed up his polarization tactic with these tidbits, which should act as warnings to targets of Alinskyite polarization:

* The real action is in the enemy’s reaction.
* The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.

To those who would decry his tactics as unwholesome and at bedrock, untruthful, Alinsky offered this rebuttal:

“Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as, ‘He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband’? This becomes political idiocy.” (Rules for Radicals; p. 134)

Even though Alinsky dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to the one he referred to as the “very first radical known to man,” none other than Lucifer, Alinsky was also quite adroit at claiming he was following injunctions by Jesus Christ, too.

“The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.” (Rules for Radicals; p. 134)

Putting himself on the same level as Christ was an Alinsky favorite and it certainly reminds me of our own Alinskyite in Chief.

President Obama has sown division among religious people too. Among Jews, he has polarized stalwart supporters of Israel and in his foreign policy moves against the tiny State, has relied on backing of anti-Israel Jewish groups, such as J-Street. President Obama has also attempted to polarize the Pope and stirred division among Catholics by speaking at Notre Dame. In religion, as well as politics, President Obama adopts the all-with-me or against-me rhetoric, but unlike God, is willing to use any dirty trick in the book to get his way.

Seems like the actions of a true radical in the Luciferian mold to me.

The bottom line on polarization is that it’s an ugly, deceitful power tactic being used unabashedly by President Barack Obama to further his own designs for America. But targeting the most popular, successful radio and television personalities in America today would seem a bit beyond the pale, even for an Alinskyite in Chief.

President Obama should, perhaps, have heeded Alinsky’s warnings on picking perfect targets:

“It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy…on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.”

With 15-20 million listeners every week and plenty of financial power, Rush Limbaugh has proven that he is not a soft target. Remember the left’s Congressional-letter fiasco. As the most highly viewed Cable news network, Fox would seem also un-amenable to easy polarizing. Eventually, other news individuals and organizations will most likely enter this president-picked fight on the side of their beleaguered Fox comrades, not to mention the millions of Fox’s angered viewers.

Backlash is forming faster than a thunder cloud on a hot summer day. It’s going to be a fine fight and I’m bidding for the popcorn concession.

By Kyle-Anne Shiver