Harry Reid's Bad Delivery of Good News
In the midst of a recession and the toughest re-election battle of his career, Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor to herald a better-than-expected unemployment report. Under the Democrats' stewardship, he tried to argue, the economy in February 2010 lost just 36,000 jobs, compared to 651,000 in the same month the prior year. But Reid's well-known predilection for poor phrasing led to one of the more sound-bytable misstatements of his long career. "Today is a big day in America," he beamed. "Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today." Although Reid's words were God's gift to Republican ad makers, his opponent proved just as rhetorically maladroit. Reid won re-election slamming Sharron Angle's every verbal miscue along the way, and lived on to gaffe another day.