The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight

Former Senate majority leader Harry Reid was a ruthless political operator who embodied the Democratic Party’s journey leftward, according to this incisive debut biography. Journalist Ralston recaps Reid’s Dickensian boyhood in Searchlight, Nev., where he grew up in a shack made of railroad ties and chicken wire. A law career and rise in local politics ensued, including a dramatic stint as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, where he wrangled with a mobbed-up casino industry. (He helped the FBI nail a corrupt slot-machine impresario—“You tried to bribe me, you son of a bitch,” he yelled while choking the perp—after which his wife found a bomb in their car.) Reid’s reign as Majority Leader, from 2007 to 2015 was marked by assiduous relationship-building, occasional smear campaigns—he falsely told reporters that Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years—and canny horse trading. Reid often put power over principle, Ralston observes, as when he pushed to weaken the filibuster in 2013 after opposing that measure when Republicans proposed it. Reid’s evolving policy stances reflect the Democrats’ shift leftward, Ralston argues, noting that, early on, Reid supported a right-to-life amendment, opposed measures protecting gay people from discrimination, and even proposed abolishing birthright citizenship. Ralston paints Reid as, above all, wryly self-aware of his own willingness to bend his principles to make progress. It’s an insightful, entertaining portrait. (Jan.)