As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid struggles to pass a health care bill in Washington and his polling numbers in Nevada continue to tank, there’s another aggravation he can’t seem to escape — the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its publisher, Sherman Frederick.
Frederick has called Reid a “political corpse,” said a visit by President Barack Obama to Nevada earlier this year “was only to try to stop Nevadans from bouncing their unpopular senior Sen. Harry Reid in 2010” and suggested that “Reid’s power so far has done more for Reid personally than it has for Nevadans as a whole.” A recent Frederick blog post openly mocked Reid’s reelection theme: “Isn’t the slogan ‘Harry Reid — independent like Nevada’ libelous as hell?”
The antipathy emanating from “the RJ,” as it’s known, which has a daily circulation of 175,000 readers and is far and away the largest newspaper in the state, is another obstacle Reid faces in trying to balance his responsibilities as Senate leader with his efforts to boost his popularity in Nevada enough to win a fifth term next year. The combative Reid, however, has not been shy about firing back, telling an RJ advertising exec at a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce meeting in August that he hoped “you go out of business.”
The uproar over those comments led to a halfhearted attempt at reconciliation between Reid and Frederick, whose newspaper did endorse Reid’s last reelection bid in 2004. “He didn’t pull a knife on me or anything,” Frederick said afterward. “He didn’t wrestle me to the ground and give me a noogie.”
But nothing changed, except that Frederick recently acknowledged changing his registration from Democrat to Republican and served as the moderator for a forum for potential GOP Senate opponents to Reid. - Politico Story
No comments:
Post a Comment