Election ’10: The future debated the past in Nevada on Thursday night, with the Tea Party’s Sharron Angle demonstrating why the Democrats will no longer be the majority and Harry Reid will no longer be their leader.

It was no easy task for Sen. Harry Reid to stand up there and try to explain why he deserved re-election as senator from a state with 14% unemployment and a foreclosure rate five times the national average.

If the policies of an administration whose legislation he quarterbacked through the Senate were working, it is certainly not evident in Nevada. This time around, he has not only failed to bring home the bacon; he left even the pork rinds behind.

The administration he defends and the stimulus he passed have failed, with even President Obama, after orchestrating a trillion-dollar fraud, now admitting there was never any such thing as a “shovel-ready” job. The only thing that is shovel-ready is the end of Reid’s political career.

Reid repeated the canard that he and fellow Democrats had voted to cut taxes for 95% of all Nevadans in the past two years and to reduce the burden on small businesses eight times.

Yet he’s willing to let the Bush tax cuts and current tax rates that have stood for a decade as law of the land expire, resulting in a more than $3 trillion tax increase on all Americans.

The best debate would have been between Harry Reid and himself. On Thursday night, with as straight a face as he could muster, the man who said about Iraq, “the war is lost,” claimed the surge that he and the president opposed worked. Reid called a man he once all but called a liar (Gen. David Petraeus) and a man he did call a liar and loser (Bush 41) his friends. Success finds a thousand fathers and at least a few hypocrites.

If Sharron Angle has become the poster child for the Tea Party movement, then Harry Reid is the symbol of the overbearing, nanny-state government that helped spawn it.

Experience is perhaps not the best teacher, for Reid has apparently learned nothing. He is the prototype career politician whose career may be over.

Reid took aim at Angle’s statement that it’s not the job of a senator to create jobs. “What she’s talking about is extreme,” he said.

“Harry Reid,” she replied sharply, “it’s your job to create policies” that lead to the creation of private-sector jobs that create wealth, not government jobs that consume wealth.

(IBD Editorial)