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A Republican president. A war of choice in the Middle East. A Democratic minority in the House and Senate. A Senate minority leader describing that war as brought on by the president’s “own stubborn hubris … and unwillingness or inability to face reality.” While historical comparisons and analogies can be overdone, the parallels between Washington in late November 2004 and today can feel a little too on the nose.

But, as Democrats debate how to respond to Donald Trump’s transgressions against our democracy and the people who live in it, those parallels mean the intraparty debate should be informed by the lessons of 2004. And that’s particularly true of the strategies and tactics of the Senate minority leader quoted above: Harry Reid, who served as Democrats’ Senate leader from 2005 to 2017. In a new biography of Reid, journalist and legendary Nevada-knower Jon Ralston provides an inside account of how Reid and his team held Senate Democrats together and took on the Bush administration.

The Game Changer contains several lessons for today’s Democrats. Like its subject, the book’s subtitle is blunt: “How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.” So what exactly did Reid show us, and how can that inform congressional politics today, nearly a decade after Reid left office and more than four years after his death? Ralston’s narrative of Reid’s first two years as minority leader, 2005 to 2006, suggests three considerations: attitude, actions, and communications.

First, attitude. Reid’s own “theory” of politics, as described by Ralston, is unsubtle. “What Reid cared about was the acquisition of power and using it to the ends he saw were justified—for his country, his state, his family, his friends.” When Reid succeeded Sen. Tom Daschle, who had lost his own reelection campaign, as Democratic leader, the party had just lost four Senate seats. President George W. Bush had won reelection with not just a plurality, but a majority of the popular vote. Bush declared that he had “earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it” on privatizing Social Security.

While Reid spoke with Bush about “the need for reconciliation” after a contentious campaign, his message for his own Democratic caucus was unbowed. Ralston obtained from the Reid archive the new leader’s prepared remarks for a private meeting of Senate Democrats, and quotes the “extraordinary” text at length. Reid argued that “We are faced with a wartime President who claims a popular mandate for his programs, and his appointments … with a uniquely partisan majority in this body … and with the other House of........

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