Reid, Angle seize on old gaffes in Nevada’s Senate race

Sharron Angle is not running against only Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She is also running against herself.

Nevada’s Senate candidates may have plenty to debate — namely, how to revive the state’s annihilated tourism economy — but their race has partly played out in a time warp: Both campaigns have sparred over statements that are sometimes years old.

With Labor Day marking the traditional start of campaign bloodletting, it’s unclear whether the tactic can withstand the two-month sprint to the ballot box. Though past controversies can indicate a candidate’s future policy decisions, the severity of Nevada’s economic woes could somewhat dilute any blast-from-the-past strategy.

But that hasn’t stopped both campaigns, particularly Reid’s, from trying.

Democrats, hoping to brand Angle as an extremist, jumped in the time machine first. A longtime fixture in Nevada politics, the Republican has never before needed to soften her conservative beliefs. So opponents have repeatedly trotted out Angle’s potentially controversial statements, often effectively linking them to current headlines.

“Harry Reid is saying, ‘You don’t have to love me, but look what you’re choosing if you vote for Angle,’” said Eric Herzik, chairman of the Political Science Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.

To mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Democrats reminded voters that, in 2005, Angle said she’d support lawmakers who voted against $62 billion in aid to hurricane-ravaged areas because there weren’t enough details on how the money would be spent. On Wednesday, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu lambasted Angle for what he described as her “callousness.”

The dust-up over her Katrina comment followed news of a 2009 interview in which Angle agreed with a radio host who said some members of Congress might be “domestic enemies,” which the Reid team gleefully paired with her musing this year that “2nd Amendment remedies” might be warranted should Congress not change hands.

“Angle’s radical views — from her plans to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, to her ‘sink or swim’ message to Katrina victims, to her advocacy of armed revolt against government — these statements aren’t gaffes, they’re long-held positions Sharron Angle believes at her very core,” said Reid spokesman Kelly Steele.

But Angle’s camp dismissed Reid’s tactics as akin to changing the subject during an uncomfortable conversation.

“His record on the economy is disgraceful, so he’s looking for any distraction that he can find,” said Angle spokesman Jarrod Agen.

Though surveys show the race neck and neck, there are signs that Republicans are doing some hand-wringing. More than two-thirds of Angle voters wish the GOP had nominated someone else, according to a poll last month for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and KLAS-TV. Fewer than one-fifth of Reid voters felt the same about their candidate, though his overall approval ratings remain gloomy.

Reid’s longtime penchant for gaffes has also handed Angle’s campaign some ammunition.

With President Obama marking the formal end of combat operations in Iraq this week, the GOP has hammered Reid on his 2007 comment that “this war is lost.” And when Reid wondered last month “how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican,” opponents resurrected his past appraisal of Obama as a “light-skinned” African American who could turn his “Negro dialect” on and off.

On Wednesday, Angle’s campaign unveiled a website — the “Harry Reid Soundboard!” — that revived moments the majority leader would probably prefer that voters forget. For example, earlier this year, Reid responded to a monthly jobs report by saying on the Senate floor: “Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.”

Herzik, however, noted that Reid’s gaffes translate less smoothly into TV sound bites than Angle’s and, in the case of “this war is lost,” touch on a subject that rankles many voters: In a recent CBS News poll, nearly 60% of respondents said the Iraq war was a mistake.

So while focusing on the past is a sound strategy for Reid, Herzik said, Angle must stay rooted in the present. “Her major card in this game is the economy,” he said. That much is clear from Angle’s latest TV ad, in which she ticks off dour economic statistics in hopes of convincing voters that Reid, not she, is an “extremist.”

ashley.powers@latimes.com