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Exhibitions Of Ineptitude (DAVID BRODER, 5/02/07, Washington Post)

Not since Bill Clinton famously pondered the meaning of the word "is" has a Democratic leader so confused things as Harry Reid managed to do with his inept discussion of the alternatives in Iraq.

Nor is this the first time that Senate Democrats, who chose Mr. Reid as their leader over Chris Dodd, have had reason to ponder the political fallout from Mr. Reid's tussles with the language.

Hailed by his staff as "a strong leader who speaks his mind in direct fashion," Mr. Reid is assuredly not a man who misses many opportunities to put his foot in his mouth. In 2005, he attacked Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as "one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington."

He called President Bush "a loser," then apologized. He said Bill Frist, then the Senate majority leader, "has no institutional integrity" because Mr. Frist planned to leave the Senate to fulfill a personal term-limits pledge. Then he apologized to Mr. Frist.

Most of these earlier gaffes were personal, bespeaking a kind of displaced aggressiveness on the part of the one-time amateur boxer. But Mr. Reid's verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to American policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

The featherweight Harry Reid is the price Democrats pay for not being able to put the actual ideological leaders of the Party out in front of the cameras.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2007 7:29 AM