He’s good, but Reid made big mistakes

By Dale Quale, Las Vegas

Wednesday, April 8, 2015 | 2 a.m.

I’m a liberal Democrat, and Harry Reid was no wealth-transferring, wild-eyed socialist as Fox News and the unhinged 20 percent proclaimed. He was a conservative Western politician, a Mormon hardscrabble son of Searchlight.

He did some good things, such as stopping Yucca Mountain and setting aside conservation areas. But as Senate majority leader, and even before, he made poor decisions and showed inept leadership. He voted for the Patriot Act and the Iraq war. He bailed out the too-big-to-fail banks. He’s never met a free-trade agreement he didn’t like. But his biggest failing was to misjudge and then do too little too late about Republican obstruction and bullying. He brought his dancing shoes to their knife fight and made all Democrats look like wimps. Democracy is threatened. Thank you, Harry.

I pray new leadership calls out and names names with the Tea Party wingnuts and the clown-car Republican presidential wannabes. Our ideas and solutions are better because we’re grounded in reality.