Las Vegas Review-Journal - Steve Sebelius Slash Politics

Editor’s note: This column appears in this week’s Las Vegas CityLife.

Nobody should blame the late Charlotte McCourt for the anti-Harry Reid jeremiad that was the graceless, classless obituary that appeared in the Review-Journal July 13.

It was not McCourt who scandalized her own memory, but rather members of her family, who felt it appropriate to include in the 84-year-old’s sendoff the following: “We believe Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to the U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work,” and, “in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate.”

So we’re to believe that a woman who lived 84 years, who raised a family of five children and lived to enjoy 20 grandchildren and 65 great-grandchildren had as her final wish before departing this vale of tears the defeat of a politician with whom she apparently disagreed, and to whose cause she regretted rendering aid? This cannot be true, in which case it’s a libel. Allowing, however, for the possibility that it is true, it speaks more of the departed than of Reid, who gracefully held his fire in light of the insult.

It’s true modern politics are more polarized. But to use a family member’s obituary — for which the R-J charges money and in which nearly anything may be said — to mount an attack on a political figure seems a waste of more than just money.

“We didn’t mean to create a stir,” said McCourt’s daughter, Lanny Shea of Pahrump, to the R-J. But of course they did; otherwise, why do it at all? Or could this family come up with no finer way to memorialize a lost love one than a political polemic?

The McCourt family’s enmity toward Reid seems to stretch back decades, to a time when the just-elected Congressman Harry Reid allegedly failed to return the phone calls of Patrick McCourt, Charlotte’s husband, over a matter of Social Security benefits. And since at least one member of the family — Shea — told the R-J she’s leaning toward supporting Reid’s Republican rival, Sharron Angle, it bears repeating that Angle has, at various times, said she wants to “transition out” of Social Security. Mr. McCourt should fear getting that return phone call, although it’s doubtful he’d do much better than before. If Angle is to be believed when she says she wouldn’t pick up the phone to assist the state’s largest employer save thousands of jobs at CityCenter, it’s not likely she’d take the time to help someone solve a problem with a program her own father compared to welfare.

Another point of contention seems to be the matter of “big government,” especially with respect to the recently passed health-care law, according to another sister, Sherry d’Hulst. “We have all become more conservative,” d’Hulst told the R-J. This explains why many McCourt family members were big supporters of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

What it doesn’t explain is why they’d dislike the health-care plan Reid helped shepherd through the Senate, as it’s very similar to their man Romney’s reform plan enacted when he ran the Bay State, complete with the individual mandate that conservatives so detest when applied by a Democratic administration at the national level.

In the end, this appears to be nothing more than a personal grudge nursed over the decades, raising its ugly head at a time that should be set aside for celebrating the life of a loved one. More’s the pity the McCourt family cheapened that occasion with political bile.

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