Former Democratic Senate Chairman Harry Reid died Tuesday at the age of 82. Effective, ruthless and cautious, Reid used his position as chairman of the Senate Democratic Group from the end of the Bush years until the Obama presidency to promote democratic laws and protect programs like social security.

His adaptive nature led Reid from a bipartisan moderate in the Clinton years to a progressive fighter at the end of his career as he pushed through as much of President Barack Obama’s agenda as possible. Reid’s quiet determination made him powerful enough to demand that Obama remove then-Vice President Joe Biden from back-room negotiations with the Republicans because Biden was viewed as a surrender to the GOP. (“None of the deals Biden made have aged well,” a Democratic Senate official told politics back then.)

Reid also helped advance the careers of a new generation of Democratic Party leaders. “When I first met him, he spoke about power in a way I hadn’t heard in a long time, let alone from democratic organizers or activists,” said Indivisible Managing Director Mari Urbina, who worked in Reid’s office at 2008 to 2015, told me this spring.

“No modern Democrat has understood how Reid can use power against the Republicans,” Murshed Zaheed, a progressive Democratic strategist who worked in Reid’s office from 2007 to 2009, told me on Wednesday. “He never waited for a revelation – he attacked and attacked even more – and won most of the fights.”

I’ve spoken extensively with Reid over the past year, both for one nation article on his influence on the progressive wing of his party and on a second project that is still under development. During our conversations, Reid told me about his life and philosophy of government, and shared stories about his work in the Senate.

B.orn in Searchlight, Nevada, Reid spent his early years in the tiny, depressed former mining town in 1939 before leaving for high school in nearby Henderson. From there he went to Southern Utah University, then to George Washington Law School – and, with a law degree, back to Nevada to climb the political ladder of the state.

He got up quickly. Within a decade, Reid became Henderson City Attorney, then Lieutenant Governor, then Nevada Gaming Chairman, and entered Congress in 1980. He won his Senate seat in 1986 and stayed there until his retirement in 2017.

In Washington in the 1990s and early 2000s, Reid took positions aimed at appeasing a Democratic Party base that was perceived to be right-wing. Democratic politicians, shackled by the Clinton triangulation and consumed by a desire to oust GOP voters, got it right on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. The party sought to outperform the right-wing Republicans and, in anticipation of electoral dominance for years to come, worked to regain the cloak of militarism it had briefly abandoned in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Reid followed these trends. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act but refused to endorse the anchoring roe as law and supported both wars in Iraq. Later in his career, when the party’s grassroots became more left-wing, Reid’s policies changed. He opposed the occupation of Iraq, led the Senate’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and softened his position on abortion.

It is not known whether Reid’s assumption of more progressive positions was principled or calculated. But his policies did not deviate from a relatively liberal belief system that allowed flexibility as he pushed for the overarching goal of Democratic Party’s dominance. In Reid’s tale, he was ready to follow the wisdom of his colleagues.

“I’ve watched other leaders – Senator Byrd, Senator Dole, Trent Lott, Dr. Deadline, Tom Daschle – I’ve watched them all, ”Reid told me. “I felt like they did a good job, but they were too personally involved. Everything came from the Führer. I wanted to do something so that there would be more consensus within my group on what we should do. “

This consensus approach was not only pursued for the benefit of the individual legislators who formed Reid’s caucus. It was smart policy. Reid gave members of his faction a vote in decision-making, preferring the party’s camera-hungry senators to make Sunday TV show hits; a decision that earned her loyalty. The use of consensus went hand in hand with a philosophy that believed that some conflict was necessary, a holdover from Reid’s days as a boxer. And maintaining good relations within the party, from the White House to Senate staff, gave Reid a glimpse into the party’s future that others in the democratic leadership lacked.

Reid saw the potential of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2015 campaign to challenge Hillary Clinton long before the rest of the Democratic establishment understood what was happening. In our conversation last August, Reid said that while Sanders presented himself as an underdog in the campaign, the Vermont Senator was an “unsung hero” of the Obama years and a “constructive” team player.

“Bernie was very good at organizational things,” said Reid. “For example, he was trying to attract delegates instead of attracting them on television – he was trying to organize the delegates. He was very clever about this, and I knew from experience that this was a road to success. So I knew that he would be fine. “

Earlier this year, the Nevada political machine Reid had built split from the state party after an upstart from Sanders-influenced progressives took power, a sign that the former Senate leader remains cool in power even after retirement . Reid has always been a skilled student of US politics. As always, the constant was power – and Reid’s use and closeness to it.

P.People close to Reid told me how the former senator’s style of running his co-workers and fellow lawmakers still inspired their loyalty, affection, and respect. And the end result of Reid’s mastery of the political system meant that his tactics were seen as effective and emulated by a younger generation of Democrats like Orthman and Urbina.

Reid’s commitment to the careers of new progressive leaders in the Democratic Party was based not so much on an affinity for what they were fighting for, but on a political calculation of how to keep power. By cultivating the promotion of progressive leaders through office, Reid made sure that they remained loyal to him despite all the divergences in politics. Likewise, Reid would lean further to the left in his last term in office and even call for an end to the filibuster in his retirement.

“If the Senate cannot address the major issues of our time, it is time for the Chamber to change itself, as it has in the past,” Reid said wrote for The New York Times in 2019. “This decision was not an easy one for me.”

Former Adam Jentleson who heads the Battle Born Collective communications group with fellow Reid alum Rebecca Katz, told me that one of Reid’s greatest advantages in Washington politics is knowing how and when to fight. Where other politicians tended to avoid conflict and the bad press that went with it, Reid was willing to take a blow to move forward.

“To gain a strategic advantage, you sometimes have to take blows to take a position that ultimately brings a strategic advantage,” said Jentlesen.

The combative approach to politics is part of what drove the senator to succeed. Reid’s infamous 2012 campaign slander against Mitt Romney – Romney hadn’t paid taxes for a decade, which was not entirely true – is a good example of the “dog of attack” policy used by the Nevada Senator to serve Democratic victories. (When CNN’s Dana Bash asked him after the election if he regretted the charges, Reid shrugged: “Romney didn’t win, did she?”)

When it came down to fighting down with the GOP, the Senator was ready to do anything to win. Reid led the Democratic Group against Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005, which resulted in a major victory over the incumbent and the majority party, earning him respect and affection from the party’s newly-pronounced progressive wing.

“The ideological lines were just so different from the landing, with the Iraq war being a major dividing line,” said former employee Ari Rabin-Havt. “At Reid, you saw someone who was willing to basically say that we can’t surrender to social security cuts – we have to fight it to the death.”

Reid knew how to scrap. He famously adorned his future father-in-law about the older man’s disapproval of his daughter marrying outside of the Jewish faith. They would make up later. Reid said one of the most important lessons he learned in boxing is that you can lose in a fight. Overcoming this fear was a fundamental part of his conception of power.

“That’s my philosophy of life,” Reid told me in the spring. “You can’t be afraid of losing.”

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