Help from a boy who came from Searchlight, Nevada

So Harry Reid, the former senator from Nevada, has died, and I’m not enough of a student of political science to say whether he was great in any particular way. As a writer for Politico notes, he had flaws, as must any politician. He voted for the invasion of Iraq. And I think it was a mistake that he reduced the requirement for 60 votes of approval for presidential appointees, a move that Republicans then met and raised, allowing questionable Supreme Court appointments by Donald Trump.

However, I am grateful for his role—a very large one, as the Senate majority leader during the first term of President Barack Obama—in getting Obamacare passed.

At the time, I felt I was getting smothered by the cost of insurance. It threatened to take half my annual income. then Obamacare came along and I could breath again. I just wish they could have figured out a climate change bill, but the farm and coal states weren’t ready for it then.

Opponents of the package called it Obamacare, and they meant it derisively. I used it in a conversation with my financial planner, who seemed surprised. He didn’t understand that I had interpreted the phrase as a compliment, similar to the way we named Hoover Dam to honor Herbert Hoover and Lake Powell to recognize John Wesley Powell.

You could argue that this form of socialism allows low-life slackers like me to depend upon the hard work at least better choices made by others. The same sort of argument was made in the 1930s about the New Deal programs. Ditto for Medicare and Medicare in the 1960s. My grandparents had to be persuaded to participate. It went against their hardscrabble grains. No indoor plumbing until 1963, no electricity until 1948.

That electricity to their dryland farm north of Fort Morgan, it should be noted, resulted from the form of socialism that produced rural electrical cooperatives and, slightly differently, the railroads that threaded the West and the dams that provided water for our farms and cities.

Back to Harry Reid. Reared as a Mormon, he grew up in a place called Searchlight. This is in the Mojave Desert about an hour south of Las Vegas. I stopped there one morning several years ago. I had attended a water conference in Las Vegas and, returning to Denver, the plane turned around somewhere over Crested Butte because DIA was closed.

Rather than sit around Las Vegas, I rented a car and drove and drove and drove, visiting the outskirts of LA before veering to the Imperial Valley of California, where the lettuce for tonight’s salad will likely have originated. It is grown with Colorado River water of which at least some became water after the snow melted around crested Butte. Returning that Monday morning to Las Vegas, I paused in Searchlight because that was where Harry Reid grew up.

The old Rocky Mountain News had a reporter who wanted to call every place smaller than Los Angeles, where he grew up, “tiny.” Eagle was tiny. Casper, Wyo., was tiny or at least a small town. Wonder if the AP stylebook has guidance on such matters.

However big Searchlight was when Harry Reid grew up there, it wasn’t a large place then nor is it now. It has a population of 318 people.

I liked that about Harry Reid. He wasn’t born into wealth or privilege, as The Washington Post notes. HIs father was an itinerant miner, his mother a laundress who did work for brothels, and the family lived in a house made form railroad ties without an indoor toilet. A boxer as a young man, he fought his way politically to Washington to help out little people like me.

The airport that I flew from after my weekend of travel beyond Las Vegas was then called McCarran International Airport. It was named after a mid-20th century politician from Nevada ago who it seems wore quite a lot of elitism on his shoulders. He seemed to have no regard for Jews, blacks and others.

The day I arrived in Las Vegas in mid-December, the airport was renamed after Harry Reid. With the death of Reid this week, the Washington Post notes that Barack Obama, while still a junior senator from Illinois, was encouraged by Reid to run for president.

Obama may not go down as our greatest president, but I think he was a good one and one who also wore the mantle very well of being a first, just as someday a woman will have to wear that mantle for her sex.

RIP Harry Reid. — Allen Best, Dec. 30, 2021

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