The Democrats' Inside Man

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But the challenge is different when his party is in charge. The newly empowered Democratic committee chairs are aching to flex their muscles. Labor chairman Edward Kennedy wants to write a "clean" bill raising the minimum wage, but Reid doubts it could pass without including tax breaks for business that Republicans are demanding. Even Reid's freshmen are uppity. When he called Virginia's Senator Jim Webb to inform him of his committee assignments--the standard backwater spots that junior members are usually consigned to--Webb demanded "A" assignments on both Armed Services and Foreign Relations. Since Webb's surprise victory gave Reid his majority, Webb got what he wanted.

There are also certain to be tensions with the Democratic House, where the rules give Speaker Pelosi far more power. In private, Senate sources say, Reid has been critical of the Speaker for what he believes was unnecessary roughness in ramming through her first-100-hours agenda, refusing to allow Republicans to propose amendments and breaking her campaign promise to open up the lawmaking process. There may also be some gavel envy; Pelosi will be able to pass one hard-line piece of legislation after another out of the House--putting Reid in the impossible spot of trying to find 60 votes for these bills in the Senate.

In his new role, Reid will be under more personal scrutiny. When it was reported last fall that Reid had used campaign money to pay Christmas bonuses to employees of the Ritz-Carlton condominium where he lives in Washington, Republican Senator John McCain told a G.O.P. crowd that Reid has "always been a little on the edge," according to Vanity Fair. Reid, who repaid his campaign and didn't know about the comment until I told him about it, retorted, "Interesting, coming from one of the Keating Five"--referring to the scandal in which McCain was one of five Senators accused of interceding with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings-and-loan executive. McCain received a mild rebuke from the ethics committee in 1991.

Tough going is nothing new for Reid, who was born 67 years ago in Searchlight, Nev., a Mojave Desert town so small that he had the same teacher for his first eight years of school. His father was a hard-drinking miner, and his mother took in washing from local brothels. As an adult, Reid converted to Mormonism. (He is to the right of his caucus on social issues, being against abortion and most gun-control measures.)

Reid says he isn't part of the capital culture and doesn't care to be. He avoids the social circuit, preferring to spend his time reading nonfiction, power walking and doing yoga (yes, yoga--four times a week). "I try to be in the background more than the foreground," he says. "And I succeed most of the time." That's because Reid knows better than most where the real work gets done.