Reid “is truly hard as a diamond, and tough,” an associate says. “Nobody pushes him around.”Photograph by Jeff Riedel / Contour by Getty Images

One evening in Las Vegas, I dropped in on a bimonthly meeting of the Clark County Republican Party at which Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate, was scheduled as the last speaker on a long program. The meeting was in a function room somewhere within the vastness of the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a coach-class establishment a couple of miles from the Strip. Several of the folding tables set up around the perimeter of the room had a martial air; at one, the Republican nominee for Congress in Nevada’s First District, Kenneth Wegner, a retired career Army man who looks like central casting’s idea of a nineteen-fifties F.B.I. agent, had an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on display.

Three groups were given time at the podium. Gun Owners of America broke off from the National Rifle Association in the nineteen-seventies; many of its members considered the N.R.A. too soft in its defense of the Second Amendment. Among its causes is making sure that military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder are not denied access to guns. Oath Keepers is a new organization, chartered in Las Vegas, made up of current and former police, military, and firefighters who have promised not to carry out orders that violate the U.S. Constitution, if such orders are given (from the organization’s declaration: “We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps”). The third group was the American Family Business Institute, which is dedicated to abolishing the inheritance tax.

Dick Patten, the head of the American Family Business Institute, spoke first. Like many of the people in the room, he trafficked in an amiably expressed hatred of Harry Reid, Nevada’s senior senator, the Senate Majority Leader, and Sharron Angle’s opponent. (“DUMP REID” T-shirts were the unifying fashion motif of the audience.) Patten described a day during the George W. Bush Administration when he was sitting in the Senate visitors’ gallery thinking he would finally witness the permanent abolition of the inheritance tax. He had met with several wavering Democratic senators, and he was confident they’d be with him.

Then he watched Harry Reid buttonhole the waverers on the floor: Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana; Maria Cantwell, of Washington; and Mark Pryor, of Arkansas. Reid, a slight, bland-looking man, the furthest thing from one’s picture of Lyndon Johnson enacting the same scene, approached the Senators, one after the other, leaned in close, and began arguing. As Patten perceived the scene (the Senators themselves perceived it differently), each of the three recoiled slightly, and then, as Reid spoke on and on, yielded with a visible sag. The Senate allowed only a temporary cessation of the tax, and Patten vowed to work hard to help get rid of Harry Reid and everything he represented: insiderism, vote trading, big government.

Someone got up and announced that Sharron Angle would speak next, because she had a plane to catch. Angle is a small woman, a sixty-one-year-old grandmother with a broad, open face, a toothy smile, and red hair worn in a pageboy. She has a friendly manner and a firm handshake, along with a set of basic political skills that Harry Reid lacks. These include the ability to chat pleasantly for a minute or two and then tactfully extract herself, and to say what she stands for quickly, with real passion but usually without seeming odd or threatening.

Since June, when she won the Republican nomination, Angle has spent much of her time raising money from national conservative organizations and trying to present herself as a reasonable member of the Party. This entails, among other things, avoiding the press. A famous YouTube video shows her running across a parking lot, pursued by a television crew. You can’t blame her. Back in the summer, a reporter from Talking Points Memo called her at home and succeeded in getting her husband, Ted, who once worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management, to indicate that the couple supports the Oath Keepers. There are no longer any such encounters.

That evening at the Orleans Hotel, she offered the expected set of scripted lines, but she made them sound genuine: “Our Contract with America is the Constitution”; “I want Harry Reid to stop doing more for Nevada—we can’t afford it!” She went on to offer a number of policy positions: repeal the health-care-reform bill; liquidate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal home-mortgage agencies; oppose the Administration’s lawsuit aimed at overturning Arizona’s immigration law. And then she bustled out, spared by the change in her schedule from having to share the podium with the evening’s more controversial speakers.

Nevada in 2010 is a kind of pilgrims’ shrine for people who don’t like the direction the American government has taken since 2008, when Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and won the White House. Harry Reid is the highest-ranking member of Congress whose seat is vulnerable, and Sharron Angle has been able to draw support both from small donors and from national organizations like the anti-tax Club for Growth, the Tea Party Express, and American Crossroads, the new conservative organization co-founded by Karl Rove. Her fund-raising trips have borne fruit. During July, August, and September, she raised fourteen million dollars.

One of the political pilgrims is Eric Odom, a thirty-one-year-old career conservative in a baseball cap, a soul patch, and beach sandals, who works as an online organizer and claims to have started the very first Tea Party group, just days after Rick Santelli’s famous rant in February of 2009 on CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. I met Odom one day in Las Vegas, not long after he had moved back from Chicago just to help take down Reid. He and a few other young men rented a modest suite in an office park and prepared for months of Internet fund-raising, video production, and takeout pizza. As their Web site puts it, “We are dedicated to doing our part to help by letting every single Nevadan know what damage Harry has done to our State and our Country.”

“Sharron Angle (center), at a Tea Party rally. She is in a dead heat with Senator Reid in Nevada.”

Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

This jaunty hyper-confidence is the essence of the conservative mood right now—a sense that the tide is antigovernment, and sweeping everything along with it. Nevada is in such bad shape that comparisons to the Great Depression are justified. It has the highest foreclosure rate, the highest bankruptcy rate, proportionally the highest state budget deficit, and the highest state unemployment rate in the country. In Las Vegas, everywhere you look are empty buildings, abandoned construction sites, unkempt houses with for-sale signs in their yards, and apartment complexes offering spectacular deals.

When Barack Obama came into office, the country seemed to be adhering to a familiar script: economic catastrophe followed by a turn toward liberalism. Congress passed more major pieces of progressive legislation in one session than it has in decades. Now Nevada, which in 2008 voted Democrats into office at all levels, may be about to toss out the most nationally powerful politician in its history. And Republicans are making a new argument. They are saying that the country needs to reduce radically the activities of the government, just when you’d expect people to be looking to the government for help.

In Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, in 1981, he memorably declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” But for three decades most people in Washington have taken that as an inspired piece of rhetoric, not as a serious policy. None of the three Republican Presidents during that time—Reagan and the two Bushes—actually reduced the size or the scope of the federal government. George W. Bush started the most expensive new social program in years—the prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens—and enormously increased the government’s power over local schools through the No Child Left Behind law.

Meanwhile, Democratic Presidents have cautiously chipped away at Reagan’s slogan. Bill Clinton, in his second Inaugural Address, knowing he’d never run for office again, dared to go only this far: “Government is not the problem, and government is not the solution.” Barack Obama offered a stronger defense of government, earlier in his Presidency. In a commencement address at the University of Michigan, in May, he said, “When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.” And, “The ability for us to adapt our government to the needs of the age has helped make our democracy work since its inception.”

Sharron Angle, more than most other Republicans, has been willing to oppose government not just in general but in particular. Over the years, she has called for abolishing the Departments of Energy and Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and for privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. In her one debate with Reid, last week, Angle displayed again her uncanny ability to come across as a plainspoken, unpolished political amateur who believes that American politics is run by terribly misguided people. She said that she would have voted against the confirmation of Obama’s two appointees to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, because “neither one of them understand the Constitution.” (Angle talks about the Constitution constantly.) What can she mean by that? Or by “Man up, Harry Reid!” But nobody seemed to care—not even her opponent. Reid kept saying that government should provide something that he knows is popular (like mandated insurance coverage of mammograms), and Angle kept saying that it shouldn’t. Reid plainly had gone into the debate with the idea that he could demonstrate that Angle is “extreme,” but nothing seemed to stick.

This race is not just a matter of the usual campaign byplay. It’s a test of whether Americans don’t want “government” or really don’t want government—the modern state. And it takes place in a petri dish where some of the distinctive aspects of American life in the twenty-first century (loosening of social bonds, soaring hope in new ventures, rootlessness, risk, debt) have been cultured, so they are on display in a potent form.

Harry Reid looks like a country par son, with a thin, vertically lined face, pursed lips, a short hank of neatly parted gray hair, and small wire-rimmed spectacles. Although he first ran for office at the age of twenty-eight and he is now seventy, he is still strikingly bad at the public part of his job. His voice is soft, with little resonance. When he’s talking to someone, he has a habit of looking down instead of into the person’s eyes. His gestures on a podium are awkward hand chops. He does not naturally embody the conservative view that he is an all-powerful caudillo.

“He’s not a charismatic person who’s gifted with great oratorical skills,” Richard Bryan, who met Reid when they took the bar exam together, in 1963, and went on to serve with him in the state legislature and the U.S. Senate, says. “He doesn’t fit into the mold of a hail-fellow-well-met. His retail political skills—working the room, marching in a parade—that’s not his strong point.” Reid is prone to crassly impolitic remarks. Earlier this year, it was revealed that he had praised Obama for not speaking in “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”; more recently, he has called Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, the “hottest member” of the Senate, and remarked, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”

It is a mistake, though, to regard Reid as ineffectual. He is obsessive in his work habits. Everybody in Nevada politics has a story about the brusque telephone calls he makes at all hours. He’ll check in as often as several times a day, for five minutes, two minutes, thirty seconds. You’ll be saying something and it will dawn on you that he has hung up without saying goodbye. Once, Reid recruited a candidate to run for an important state office, and during a phone call she complained about fund-raising difficulties: click. Reid doesn’t like whiners. He found another candidate.

“He is truly hard as a diamond, and tough,” Bryan says. “Nobody pushes him around. He’s always thinking one step ahead. He never forgets. Never forgets.” Two years ago, Reid published an autobiography, “The Good Fight,” written with the assistance of Mark Warren, of Esquire. Like the autobiographies of Reid’s Republican colleague John McCain, it was meant to “humanize” (as they say in politics) a top-ranking official who had a reputation for being hard to love. But what shines through is Reid’s lack of the natural gregariousness and geniality that most people associate with the political personality.

Harry Reid was born poor and out of wedlock in the desert mining town of Searchlight, Nevada. His father was a hard-rock miner who didn’t get through the eighth grade; Reid hints broadly that both his parents were drunks. Their house was a wooden cabin, built out of smelly creosote-treated railroad ties instead of fragrant logs. There was no indoor plumbing. “We had a little tree in our yard for a while,” Reid writes. “It died. The yard is just rocks—things don’t grow.” Sometimes in the evenings, he and his younger brother Larry (there were four Reid brothers in all) sat outside their parents’ bedroom door, “listening to what goes on on the other side”—which, Reid indicates, was something violent.

When a boy from another town moved to Searchlight, Reid admits, “the first thing I did was pick a fight with him. He was new, and I was jealous of him. He probably dressed decently, was probably well spoken.” Reid beat another kid so savagely that he permanently flattened one of his own knuckles. One day, Larry Reid fell off his bike and broke his leg. Although he screamed in pain, Harry thought he was faking it and initially refused to help him. Another time, Reid took a .22 rifle and went out to shoot a rabbit for dinner. With his last bullet, he merely wounded the rabbit, so he gave chase on foot for “what seemed like hours,” he wrote. “I got that rabbit. Took it home. Skinned it. Took it to my grandmother. . . . Best rabbit I ever ate.” At fourteen, Reid had a fistfight with his father (because he was beating Reid’s mother). At nineteen, he had a fistfight with his future father-in-law (because he opposed his daughter’s marriage).

Mike O’Callaghan, a high-school teacher and coach of Reid’s, taught him to channel his aggression by becoming an amateur boxer. O’Callaghan also set up a group of businessmen who paid for his college education. In 1957, Reid went to the College of Southern Utah, and then to Utah State University and in 1959 to George Washington University Law School. He paid his tuition by working as a member of the U.S. Capitol police force.

Reid married his high-school sweetheart, Landra, in 1959. She was Jewish, but they both became Mormons. They had four sons and a daughter. O’Callaghan, who would go on to become the governor of Nevada, helped Reid get into politics. Reid won a seat in the state assembly in 1968, and two years later, at the age of thirty, he became O’Callaghan’s lieutenant governor. While he was in that office, his father shot himself. He arrived in Searchlight to the sight of “my dad, still on his bed, his troubles over,” he wrote. “Nothing had been touched. The gun and the blood were still there.” Reid did not speak publicly about his father’s suicide for twenty-five years.

Reid’s lack of natural electioneering talent and a certain over-aggressiveness in seizing opportunities led to an uneven career. He narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race in 1974, then ran for mayor of Las Vegas and lost badly. O’Callaghan rescued him in 1977 by giving him a job that nobody wanted: chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Charged with cleaning up the casinos, Reid faced down the real-life versions of the Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci characters in “Casino.”

The 1980 census showed that the state’s population had grown so much that Nevada got a new congressional district, in Las Vegas. Reid ran for the seat in 1982 and won—bringing with him to Washington, he writes, the gun he kept in his desk drawer in Nevada. When Paul Laxalt, who had beaten him in the 1974 Senate race, retired, in 1986, Reid ran for his seat and narrowly won. He has been reëlected three times and has become the deeply trusted protector of all the most established interests in Nevada. Still, only once in his long career has he won more than fifty per cent of the vote in an election. He’s a will-power politician.

In Reid’s accounting of his political life, there are more enemies than friends. The dean of students at George Washington Law School advised him to drop out, saying, “Mr. Reid, maybe the law is not for you.” Reid got his law degree, but he made this bitter anecdote the centerpiece of a commencement speech he gave at G.W. decades later. Jack Gordon, a minor concessionaire at one of the casinos who dreamed of getting a full-fledged gaming license, tried to bribe him when Reid was head of the Gaming Commission. Reid called the F.B.I., which set up a sting operation that wound up ensnaring Gordon, but Reid’s attitude went beyond cool professionalism: “I lunged and got him in a choke hold. I was in a rage.” He took personal umbrage at George W. Bush. “I have made no secret of my antipathy toward the second President Bush,” he wrote. He added that Bush “is an ideologue who has done incalculable damage to the government, reputation, and moral standing of the United States of America.” He twice publicly called Bush a liar, explaining, “When one lies, one is a liar.” Late in his Presidency, Bush summoned Reid to the White House and tried to appease him. “I never went to Kennebunkport as a kid,” Reid recalls. “I never went anywhere. And I’ve got no blue blood in my veins, just some desert sand. So as he and I sat there in the Oval Office, I said little in return.”

Other than a few close relationships, like the ones with his wife, Landra, and with Mike O’Callaghan, what most reliably draws warmth from Reid’s tempered-steel heart is New Deal liberalism. He likes to say that his parents’ religion was Franklin D. Roosevelt; practically the only good thing that ever happened in the life of his father was joining a union. “The American government is the greatest force for good in the history of mankind”; Social Security is “the greatest social program since the fishes and loaves.” Sig Rogich, a Nevada adman who worked in George H. W. Bush’s White House, and who, like most establishment Republicans in Nevada, is backing Reid over Sharron Angle, told me that during many evenings at his house he and Reid have relaxed to old Woody Guthrie songs on the CD player—“poignant songs about society and the poor.”

“I have a lot of angst, but I haven’t figured out how to package it.”

In 1999, Reid rose to become the Senate whip, the second position in the Democratic leadership, under Tom Daschle. Whips meticulously keep tallies of every vote and assess how solid the support for a bill is—the perfect job for a detail man like Reid. He was useful both to Daschle and to the other members of the Democratic caucus, who want constituent service from their leadership just as much as the voters back home want it from them. In 2004, he watched, fuming, as Bush cruised to reëlection and the Republicans targeted Daschle and took him down. By the time Daschle publicly conceded, on the morning after the election, Reid had already secured pledges from enough Democrats to assure him the top leadership position. The Democrats were in the minority then—and Reid was the staunchest possible defender of the Senate filibuster rules, which make it hard for the majority to pass legislation. (Lately, Reid has said, under pressure from his caucus, that he’d be willing to consider changing the rules to make the minority’s ability to filibuster less powerful.)

On the morning after the 2004 election, Bush, reinvigorated and aiming for historical significance, indicated that he was going to turn Social Security into a system of individual retirement accounts, as Republicans had long dreamed of doing. Reid pounced. He brought Senator Max Baucus’s chief of staff, Jim Messina, into his office to create a war room and work the issue relentlessly. Messina, now the deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House, told me, “When Bush had his kickoff”—for the Social Security initiative—“Reid was already out ahead of him by a month, and by March or April of ’05 I knew we had won.” Bush was virtually invincible at that point, with Democratic as well as Republican support. But “Social Security unites all Democrats. It’s the founding principle of our party,” Messina said. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He didn’t get a single other thing in his second term.”

When the Democrats swept the 2006 midterm elections, Reid became the Senate Majority Leader. He occupied the leader’s brightly tiled suite of offices just off the Senate floor and decorated them with memorabilia of F.D.R., Harry Truman, and other heroes of the modern liberal welfare state. Although Reid, as the Majority Leader, could express no preference among the members of his caucus who were running for President, he had spotted Barack Obama as a comer and given him a prominent assignment, heading up an ethics task force. After the 2008 elections, Reid’s moment had finally come: he could work with Obama and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to pass the kind of legislation he’d been raised to revere.

After Obama made his first speech on the Senate floor, in 2005, against the Iraq war, Reid approached him to compliment him on its eloquence. (Reid, who has never been as liberal on social or military issues as he is on the provision of government benefits, voted for the war.) As Reid tells the story, “And I will never forget his response. Without the barest hint of braggadocio or conceit, and with what I would describe as deep humility, he said quietly: ‘I have a gift, Harry.’ ” Surely, Reid’s sense of awe was intensified by knowing that Obama’s gift is one that he lacks. Conversely, Reid’s gift—relentlessly working the Senate Democratic caucus, member by preening member—is one that Obama lacked any interest in during his four years in the Senate.

In the House, an adept Speaker with a majority can herd her entire party caucus, using the Rules Committee, which decides what legislation gets to the floor. The Senate requires far more individual attention to the members, especially if they include people as ideologically disparate as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, and Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut almost-Republican. In the partnership between the Obama White House and the Reid Senate, Obama supplied the eloquence and grace and originated the policy ideas. Reid’s role was to get it done. Between Obama’s Inauguration, in January, 2009, and the congressional recess early last month, more consequential liberal legislation passed than at any time since the Great Society: health-care reform, the economic-stimulus package, financial regulation, a big education bill, the rescue of the auto industry, and the second phase of the rescue of the big banks. Others (a large expansion of protected public lands, funding for universal broadband access) didn’t get the attention they normally would have.

It is true that the Senate session ended lamely. The landmark climate-change bill, passed by the House, was put in line behind health care, but Reid pulled it off the legislative schedule when it became too scary for electorally vulnerable Democrats. For the same reason, a vote to end Bush’s tax cuts did not take place. Reid was not able to get through two items meant to energize the Democratic base—a bill to legalize gays in the military and one to give citizenship to some children of illegal aliens. Still, what was achieved in the aggregate was very significant. Putting health care at the top of the agenda was Obama’s call, but it’s Reid’s kind of bill.

His strength is knowing and playing to his caucus. He “has an amazing ability to figure out what the other person needs,” Billy Vassiliadis, a Las Vegas adman, Democratic political consultant, and old friend of Reid’s, says. In talks with the White House, Reid would explain that each senator is a “brand”: Maria Cantwell, of Washington, is high-tech; Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, is a Federalist; and so on. One had to understand each member’s sense of himself and then find a way to play to it. This way of thinking led to the passage of some of the unlovely aspects of the health-care bill, such as the Cornhusker Compromise and the Louisiana Purchase—the deals made to get the votes of Nelson and Mary Landrieu. It also meant long months seemingly squandered as the bill sat in Max Baucus’s Finance Committee. Reid believes that respecting the power of committee chairmen helps to win their loyalty.

Reid always knew that his reëlection wasn’t going to be easy. Back in 1998, John Ensign, the rich son of a casino owner, ran against him and came very close to unseating him. In 2004, Reid had the good luck to draw as a Republican opponent a real-estate investor named Richard Ziser, whose main issue was opposition to gay marriage, and it was the only time he won reëlection comfortably. The inference seemed obvious: an economically conservative opponent with strong ties to the casinos posed a grave threat, but a social conservative did not.

Ensign ran for the Senate again in 2000, when Richard Bryan retired, and he won Nevada’s other seat. Although the 1998 race had been brutally negative on both sides, as soon as Ensign got to the Senate, Reid made a mutual non-aggression pact with him. Neither has ever publicly criticized the other or helped the other’s opponent in any but a pro-forma way. When the news broke, last summer, that Ensign had been having an affair with the wife of one of his top aides, and that he had paid the man off, Reid was entirely silent. Ensign has said nothing publicly during the conservative onslaught against Reid.

“Hi-yah!”

In 2005, Reid decided to establish an early Presidential caucus in Nevada, like Iowa’s. This forced all eight of the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates to travel to Nevada and court him. It was also a great voter-registration device. During one ninety-minute period on Caucus Day in January, thirty thousand new Democrats registered; by the end of the year, the Democrats had a hundred thousand more registered voters than the Republicans. They won the Presidential race and two of three congressional races.

By February of 2009, Reid had opened an office in Las Vegas and assembled the core of his reëlection campaign team, made up of the toughest young operatives around. He followed the 2004 script. First, his most plausible Republican opponents were persuaded not to run against him. One, Jon Porter, a former congressman, got a lobbying job with a prominent law firm. Another, Dean Heller, Nevada’s only current Republican member of Congress, was made to understand that if he just waited two years he could easily win Ensign’s Senate seat, whereas if he ran against Reid he’d be attacked every day, and political money would dry up. “He’s a very young man,” Billy Vassiliadis told me. “His kids are just starting high school. He said, ‘Do I risk an easy coast to go up against the Senate Majority Leader, who has twenty-five million dollars and is the toughest, scrappiest politician Nevada ever had?’ He’s just a tough, tough guy.” Heller didn’t run.

That left a field of twelve relatively weak opponents in the Republican primary. Of them, the one who looked the most threatening was Sue Lowden, a former beauty queen, television news anchor, and state Republican chairwoman, who is married to a casino owner and was the preferred candidate of the Party establishment in Nevada and Washington. Reid had the wit to become actively involved in the Republican primary campaign, so as to get the opponent he wanted in the fall.

One day in April, at a rally in the rural hamlet of Mesquite, Nevada, Lowden remarked that in the old days people who couldn’t afford health care would barter for medical services—bringing a chicken, for example, instead of money, as payment. Reid’s campaign went to work: instantly Lowden became a kind of nut, the “chickens for checkups” lady, roundly mocked on Comedy Central and MSNBC, and in videos that went viral on the Web. Lowden kept trying to defend herself and wound up making more of a spectacle, with the Reid campaign helping out by issuing frequent press releases about her. On Primary Day, Lowden finished second, and Reid seemed to have secured a replay of his easiest reëlection campaign.

But the takedown of Lowden carried a misleading message: if you could get any Republican to be specific about what rolling back the dreaded “government” might entail, she would be finished. On March 27th, the Tea Party movement held a rally in Searchlight, Reid’s home town, tying up traffic for hours on the two-lane highway from Las Vegas. Sarah Palin was featured on a long roster of speakers attacking Harry Reid. Sharron Angle rode out on the back of a motorcycle, in a flotilla of her supporters.

Angle is a curious political commodity: she seems marginal but always does better than people expect her to. She started out in politics as a member of the far-right Constitution Party, and in 1998 she won a seat in the state assembly as a Republican, and beat a rising star in the Party for reëlection in 2002. There she was anything but a prominent member; she was best known for voting against tax bills. Yet in 2006 she ran against Dean Heller for Congress and came within five hundred votes of beating him. In 2008, she ran against the senior Republican member of the Nevada state senate, Bill Raggio, and almost beat him. She is unlike Reid in almost every way except in her relentless determination.

Reid, as Majority Leader, has access to all the top national Democratic funding sources, as well as the ones in Nevada, and he has ceaselessly battered Angle in campaign ads. Yet she and Reid are in a dead heat in the polls. Reid’s prominence helps Angle financially, because it attracts donations from national conservative groups that want to take Reid out. Now she can afford to pound him in advertisements, too. One recent Angle TV ad told Nevada viewers, “Reid actually voted to use taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra for convicted child molesters and sex offenders.” Angle’s success forced Reid to go out and do more fund-raising, even during the hectic final days before the Senate adjourned.

Back when Reid was chairman of the Gaming Commission and helped to get the Mob out of the casino business, the point was not to diminish the business but to make it safe for big corporations and banks. What Bugsy Siegel, the mobster who built the Flamingo, was to Las Vegas originally, Steve Wynn, of the Mirage, the Bellagio, the Wynn, the Encore, and Treasure Island, is to Las Vegas today—the emblematic visionary.

Wynn moved to Las Vegas in 1967 and opened his first casino on the Strip in 1989. He saw that what had been a tourist destination for people who like to gamble could also draw conventioneers, romantic couples, the whole world. The way to accomplish this was by making the casinos into enormous first-class hotels, with name-brand food and shopping and architecture as well as entertainment. During a twenty-year period beginning in the late nineteen-eighties, the underdeveloped southern end of the Strip became home to one new behemoth casino after another, places so large that they have road signs inside. A city with four inches of rain a year became a paradise of ornamental lakes and fountains, with acres of desert land put under glass and air-conditioned.

Wynn’s other major insight was that all this could be paid for through exotic, high-leverage financial products. He started with Michael Milken’s junk bonds; by the early twenty-first century, it seemed as if half the hedge funds, private-equity funds, and other high-risk, high-reward capital pools were heavily into Las Vegas. Every major casino was carrying a high debt burden—but it didn’t matter, because more and more people were coming to town, and they were spending lavishly in the new shops and celebrity-chef restaurants and on luxury suites, not to mention on the casino floors, those oddly hushed factories where rows of purposive people bend to the task of giving the casinos their money.

“This isn’t working. I’m putting you on a plane back to Ohio.”

During the nineties, Las Vegas was the fastest-growing city in America. Developers borrowed to build subdivisions and office parks. Casino employees and construction workers borrowed to buy new houses bigger than they’d ever dreamed they’d be able to afford. When they saw their real estate rise in value, they borrowed again to buy investment property. The Clark County school district was building nearly a dozen new schools every year—also with borrowed money, in the form of a bond issue.

As Nevada’s senior senator, Harry Reid, a teetotaller who doesn’t gamble, was at the center of the creation of this new social order. He delivered for the casinos, a heavily regulated industry that lives in fear of federal gaming taxes and relies upon airports and highways, and they supported his campaigns. None of the major casino owners have publicly endorsed Angle; Steve Wynn, who recently suggested on CNBC that the government of the People’s Republic of China is more hospitable to business than the Obama Administration, gave Reid twenty thousand dollars last year.

If you think of yourself as a champion of ordinary people, you can build a case for helping the casino industry. An unskilled laborer—a valet parker, a dishwasher, a chambermaid, a waiter, a busboy—can make more money in Las Vegas than just about anywhere else. Except for the Venetian and the Palazzo, all the big casinos on the Strip have contracts with the Culinary Workers Union, which has fifty thousand members, many of them Latino. They make high wages and have decent job security, a guaranteed full workweek, no-premium family health care, and company-paid pensions. It sure beats working in a mine, as Reid’s father did.

Recessions weren’t supposed to happen in Las Vegas; even the September 11th attacks created just a brief downward blip. Over twenty years, Las Vegas became the conspicuous-consumption capital of the world. Then, beginning in 2007, and escalating in 2008 and 2009, Nevada went spectacularly bust. Last year, the state lost population for the first time since the Great Depression. Next year, the state legislature will meet to balance a budget that, on a two-year cycle, has a three-billion-dollar deficit, on total spending of less than seven billion dollars. The construction industry—Nevada’s second-largest, after casinos, during the boom years—has nearly disappeared. More than half the students in the Clark County public school system are eligible for the federal school-lunch program. The school system used to have to recruit teachers from elsewhere because it was growing so rapidly; now it has a waiting list of two thousand job applicants.

On the Strip, construction of one enormous new casino complex, the Echelon, abruptly stopped, leaving a very large vacant lot with the beginnings of a steel-girder skeleton rising from the ground. Another casino, the Fontainebleau, was halted at a later stage of construction; Carl Icahn recently bought it, for ten cents on the dollar, but has yet to resume building. The office vacancy rate in Las Vegas is twenty-four per cent. There are sixty thousand housing units on the market. Even in Searchlight, Harry Reid Road takes you to a small, half-finished subdivision, with some of the houses unoccupied and some of the lots empty.

Although the number of visitors to Las Vegas per month has been rising this year, the spending per visitor has not. “Ask any bellman,” D. Taylor, the head of the Culinary Workers Union, says. “We take coolers up to the rooms. That’s instead of room service. Look around this restaurant”—we were among the few people having dinner at the Four Seasons. “We’re it. You can get a room for ninety-nine dollars, a hundred and twenty-nine dollars, something like that. In ’07, it was three or four hundred. And the debt service is based on that.” The combination of heavy debt payments and lower receipts means that many of the Las Vegas casinos are operating in the red, and it may get worse still for them, and for homeowners, as interest rates increase and balloon payments come due.

Late one afternoon, I met with Donya Monroe, a former basketball player for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and financial adviser with Merrill Lynch, who runs a counselling center for people with housing problems. She is a commanding woman—the daughter of a two-star general—but she looked weary. “It was literally mass hysteria here,” she said. “You had a large group of people from California who took advantage of the system. Come here, buy a house, no money down, take out a HELOC—a home-equity line of credit—use it to buy another home, get a second mortgage, get some cash. And then they’re gone—poof. They all came at the same time and they all left at the same time. Then, there’s another group, the people I deal with every day. Uneducated, sign here. Their payment has gone up. They lost their job. They’re panicked. A huge portion just walked away.”

Reid reacted to the bust just as you would expect. He helped extend unemployment benefits, gave special aid to schools so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, secured money for potentially job-rich alternative-energy projects in the desert, and funded foreclosure-prevention counselling. One of the less nationally heralded pieces of Obama Administration legislation was the Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which creates a publicly funded vehicle to advertise abroad for tourism to American destinations, such as Las Vegas. Reid made that happen.

CityCenter, a vast new casino and shopping complex on the Strip, is the largest private building project in the history of North America. In 2007, its primary owner, MGM Mirage, took on Dubai World as a partner. With construction well under way and five billion dollars already sunk into CityCenter, the crash of September, 2008, hit. Dubai World sued MGM, and then the banks collectively announced that because Dubai World had sued they no longer had to honor their own obligations.

Harry Reid called Jim Murren, the chief executive of MGM, to offer his help. “I asked him to call Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J. P. Morgan, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and I’m sure he did,” Murren told me. “Everybody in the Nevada delegation called, but there’s only one Senate Majority Leader. That’s the call that got returned.” When a contractor needed a two-hundred-million-dollar payment in order to continue construction, “Reid called, the banks released the money, and we kept constructing.”

Murren, a Republican, appeared in the first television ad the Reid campaign ran this year, saying that Reid had saved twenty-two thousand jobs in Nevada with his calls to the banks. MGM is not just Nevada’s largest employer and taxpayer; it is proportionally among the largest single taxpayers in any state, supplying eleven per cent of the budget of Nevada’s government. Murren told me that Sharron Angle has never tried to meet him. She has said that she would not have made the calls that Reid made on CityCenter’s behalf.

The Reid campaign considered that comment a gift from Heaven, but it wasn’t able to sink Angle. Angle’s campaign ignores what would seem to be a basic rule of elective politics: that you have to promise to deliver government services to your constituents, especially in hard times. It may be that a large number of people in Nevada dislike Reid more than they like his works. It hasn’t helped that Reid’s son Rory, who is a Clark County executive, decided to run for governor this year. The state’s population is unusually transient—in every Senate race, roughly forty per cent of the electorate wasn’t in Nevada for the previous race. It may be that people aren’t aware of Reid’s many services to the state. It may be that the unpopularity of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments, which Reid had so much to do with, outweighs the popularity of his more mundane local record. It may be that Reid gets blamed for the state’s depression because he was in office when it arrived. Or Sharron Angle could be right: many Americans don’t want the government to help them.

One day, I visited an Angle supporter named Elissa Wahl, a thin, bespectacled young woman who runs a homeschooling organization out of her house, in one of Las Vegas’s new middle-class subdivisions. Wahl has been homeschooling for sixteen years. In 2002, when the Nevada Department of Education tried to require homeschoolers to use an approved curriculum, Wahl organized an opposition. “I believe God has laid an interest on my kids’ hearts,” she told me, “and I don’t want government to interfere with that.” She and her allies found a friend in state government: Sharron Angle.

We were sitting at Wahl’s dining-room table. Her children were taking a break from their lessons to watch television. “Back in the eighties, Sharron wanted to homeschool her son,” she said. “The school district said no. So she started a little private school in a church. She ran for the state assembly to fight for homeschooling. Because of that, we have no high-school-equivalency exam. No hundred and eighty days of school. We as parents are in charge of our kids’ education. That’s our constitutional right. We were one of the first organizations to endorse Sharron—before the Tea Party, before anyone. We never endorsed anyone before.”

She went on, “Sharron’s just a normal person, honestly. She’s small. She’s tiny, O.K.? She smiles a lot. She feels led by God to this position. She doesn’t want to live in Washington. She sincerely believes God has called her to this position and told her what to do. A lot of people say she’s kooky—like my neighbor. Well, if she’s kooky, so am I.”

In two years, the national political mood has changed at stunning speed. Barack Obama adeptly made himself the candidate who was best equipped to take advantage of liberal antipathy toward George W. Bush, but he also spoke often about transcending political partisanship. That idea helped him win states like Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia—and Nevada. So why does the country seem both so much more partisan and so much more conservative today?

Obama, with his big congressional majority and keen sense of the fleeting nature of political momentum, decided to be bold in his first two years in office. Although liberal voters are disappointed, the plain truth is that Obama, aided by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, passed much more liberal legislation at the outset of his term than his immediate Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Doing that has clearly alienated some of the centrists among his 2008 supporters.

There is no structural reason for partisanship to abate. For a number of reasons, of which the most important was the South’s long-running rage at the Republican Party over the Civil War and Reconstruction, there used to be conservatives in the Democratic Party and liberals in the Republican Party. After a half-century-long sorting-out process, the parties are much more efficiently organized ideologically: conservative Democrats (mainly Southern) have become Republicans, liberal Republicans (mainly Northern) have become Democrats. The parties have more consistent national identities, and local races are run much more on national issues.

People go to Nevada to loosen the bonds of traditional society and try something new. What has happened there over the past twenty years is a particularly American version of the economic cycle. European governments get into trouble by overloading on pensions and other expensive benefits; American governments get into trouble by practicing a kind of casino liberalism, in which credit flows too easily, everybody goes too deeply into debt, and if the growth ever stops, everything crashes. Now Nevadans are being presented with a great clash of social visions: help from Washington with Reid versus less of Washington with Angle. The stakes are real, not rhetorical. Reid’s reëlection campaign is about the role of government in the United States. Obama’s reëlection campaign will be about that, too. ♦