How Not to Get Re-Elected. Please!

A certain Sherman Frederick of the otherwise unremarkable Las Vegas Review-Journal today recounts the following remark made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Sensitivity) to the Review-Journal's director of advertising:

I hope you go out of business.

This, apparently, is Reid's way of showing support for the First Amendment, economic recovery and the welfare of his constituents.

We SWNIDishly believe that political power has the moral power to corrupt anyone who has it. But we do wonder why political power seems so thoroughly and quickly to corrupt individuals like Reid, whose corruption is so deeply rooted that he would make as outrageous a statement as this. Is it because Reid's rise to power has come through his concessions to the left wing of his party, a group with which he has little in common personally but to which he must give fealty to maintain his leadership position? Having already sold his political soul, has he nothing left to stay the nefarious, internal influence of his status?

We can't say that it's merely because Reid is a Democrat, though we are sure he would not accord the same respectful restraint to Republicans were the tables turned.

We will say that the left's view of the world doesn't help them hold power once they achieve it, at least not in a small-d democratic environment. When one believes that the masses are natural leftists whose interests are always served by the left--a variation on the notion that leftward movement is history's inevitable vector, embraced and not resisted by those who brilliantly understand such arcane matters--one naturally has few checks on one's embrace of power having once attained it. Why be careful when you are the product of inevitability with permanent, unassailable majority? You need only be sure that the deceptive, seductive voices of your opponents, who represent retrograde interests of the unrighteous minority cast into the wilderness by your millennial ascent, do not somehow lure your naive, credulous, proletarian constituents back into their former ignorance, which has always been the means of their enslavement.

So you wish for uncooperative newspapers to go out of business.

At any rate, Reid seems destined to use his profoundly inept meanness to cement his current standing in the polls, which show him trailing either of his likely Republican opponents, and trailing by the largest margin the one likely to get the nomination.

It's a long time from now until November 2010, but Reid looks determined to mimic the fate of his predecessor as Democratic Senate Majority Leader, who likewise won the support of his party at the expense of the support of his constituents.

We hope.