David Axelrod recalls the moment Harry Reid, along with Chuck Schumer, met with Barack Obama in the spring of 2006 and tried to persuade him to run for president. Obama recognized Reid was bucking the party establishment by planting the seeds of an insurgency — and he decided this unexpected twist begged serious consideration.
«I just had the strangest conversation with Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer,» he told me, fresh from a meeting with the US Senate Democratic leaders. «I didn’t know why they were calling me over there. Turns out they wanted to tell me I should run for president.» Reid, then Senate minority leader, argued that, unlike the presumptive frontrunner — Hillary Clinton — Obama was untainted by a vote for the unpopular war in Iraq, an albatross the leader feared would sink her and take some of his party’s Senate candidates down in the undertow. Far from viewing Obama’s newness to Washington, DC, as an impediment, Reid, who had served there for over 20 years, argued that the young senator’s freshness would be an asset to a country hungry for change. «They pushed me pretty hard to think about it,» Obama told me, still absorbing the full meaning of what had just transpired. «I still think it’s pretty far-fetched, but it’s interesting that they felt as strongly as they do.» I can’t say that Obama would never have come around to the idea of running for president without the quiet encouragement of Reid that spring. But I can say for sure that their conversation made a deep impression on the young senator, who knew that Reid hadn’t fought his way up through the rough-and-tumble of Nevada politics and the ranks of the US Senate by making careless bets. The fact that the leader would buck the party establishment, of which he was part, by planting the seeds of an insurgency was an unexpected turn that begged serious consideration. As different as they seemed, a tremendous bond grew between the understated Reid — who died Tuesday at 82 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer — and the charismatic young president he helped propel forward. Reid’s improbable rise from hardscrabble beginnings in the tiny brothel town of Searchlight, Nevada, was the stuff of legends, and he saw in Obama someone who had overcome his own hardships — along with withering racial barriers — to achieve unimaginable heights.
