While most Americans get to know candidates running for national office by watching TV, we actually get to see who they are up close and personal.This past week our Fox News Crew, myself, producer – Lindsay Stewart and photographer Keith Railey, got to spend a little time with the Harry Reid and Sharron Angle campaigns in Las Vegas. Reid, a Democrat who is a four term senator and the Senate Majority Leader who is trying to hang on to his seat. He’s being challenged by a conservative Republican and Tea Party favorite, former State Assemblywoman, Sharron Angle.
The candidates are neck and neck … and the campaigns are getting a bit nasty. So how did Harry Reid, a household name in Nevada, find himself in this position? I asked him that when I sat down with him at his campaign headquarters, and he said he understood that there was a lot of frustration out there with the sluggish economy, tremendous job losses and his own state’s unemployment rate at 14 percent. While he didn’t take the blame for those conditions, he did admit that he understood that voters look to blame someone.
Meanwhile Sharron Angle is blaming Reid for all the state’s woes and then some. Her take is that Reid is responsible because he drove the president’s agenda of health care reform, bank bailouts and stimulus packages, something she says Nevada voters resent. Maybe they do. Reid’s negative ratings are over 50 percent, a troubling number for any candidate trying to win re-election.
However, Reid’s contention is that if you take him out … you better be darned sure to put in someone who’s better, and he says it’s not Sharron Angle. The Reid campaign is hitting hard on the fact that Angle has spoke openly about wanting to move towards privatizing social security and doing away with some federal agencies like the Departments of Education and Energy … she says they would better serve people as local and state agencies. One of Reid’s commercials also criticizes Angle for referring to people who collect unemployment as spoiled. When we sat down to chat with her, she apologized for her words as being too harsh and suggested maybe Reid should apologize for one of the off collar remarks he has made like saying the war was lost while troops were fighting in Iraq, and that it seemed impossible to him that any Hispanic could register to be a Republican.
I could go on and on and on about all the attacks these two have levied against each other, but I would run out of space … granted that is the nature of a campaign, and this one is in overdrive. In any case, my crew and I feel pretty lucky to have the opportunity to cover this race, a race with real consequences for the people of Nevada and the balance of power in Congress.
When you actually get a few minutes to do a sit down interview with folks like Harry Reid and Sharron Angle, once in awhile you get to have a side conversation about something totally unrelated to the interview at hand. With Harry Reid I learned he doesn’t sweat, is a dead head and likes the group the Killers – who are from Las Vegas. He even refers to the band members as “those boys” and says their lyrics are terrific. Sharron Angle is still getting used to all the attention, but she doesn’t seem to sweat either. We had her in a hot room in the Las Vegas heat sans air conditioning with hot TV lights beaming down on her and she looked as cool as a cucumber. She also likes portraits of the Founding Fathers – and likes to use the phrase “we the people” when stating her positions.
These are the quirky things that make covering politics fun. We all enjoy it, otherwise we wouldn’t spend so much time chasing down candidates in the dead of summer on weekends and holidays when we could be at the beach with a good book. Chances are we’d be reading about politics anyway.
