Back home in Nevada, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid is known as the “one phone call guy” — so powerful that anyone who wants anything done for someone, or to someone, only has to make one phone call — to Reid — to make it happen.
But anyone who knows Reid well enough to make that call knows there will be one thing missing at the end — the customary words “goodbye.”
Reid always hangs up on people — whether he is mad, or telling them he loves them.
“Well I have a lot of bad habits, one of them is my telephone manner, as everybody will say. When the conversation is over, I hang up. I’ve offended people, I don’t mean to. But there’s no need to talk anymore, The conversation is over,” Reid told me in an interview here.
When veteran Nevada columnist Jon Ralston wrote about Reid’s surprise Friday announcement that he would retire at the end of his Senate term, the clearly stunned journalist explained it this way:
“How fitting that there was no buildup to his exit announcement, just a sudden ending.
“This guy just hung up on all of us.”