Harry Reid is a soft spoken kind of person mixed with brusque demeanor and his early conservative views combined with his modern status as liberal icon.
The retiring Senate minority leader hated his home town, a boom-or-bust place that was all bust in his childhood, how much he ran away from that wretched town when he started to make it in Las Vegas as a politically connected lawyer, how ashamed he was of a place that drove his father to kill himself.
A man of few words, Reid went on for nearly 80 minutes Thursday in his farewell address to the Senate, trying to explain the origins of that irascible style that defined his 30 years in the Senate.
The future Senate leader's proudest moment of his teenage years was saving up $250 from his gas-station job to buy his mother a new set of teeth.
After three decades in the Senate, four years in the House and almost 50 years of political combat in Nevada, the guy from Searchlight basked in the national political glow of a consequential career now passed. His longtime rival, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, praised Reid's tenacity.
Reid's final speech had its share of partisan flare. Fewer than 10 Republicans attended the morning address, and Reid did not mince words when he condemned Republicans for what he considered the "abuse of the filibuster" during his eight years as majority leader.
Reid served as one of the driving figures, along with McConnell, in securing the $700 billion bailout of big banks during the Wall Street implosion of 2008. And, before he became his party's floor leader in 2005, Reid served on the Appropriations Committee with Republican legends such as Ted Stevens (Alaska), carving up the federal budget to deliver billions of dollars in federal spending to their respective states.
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