“I don’t really care. I think they’re all losers.”
So Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid dismissed the entire pool of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls in two spare sentences. The Nevada senator was talking to CNBC in an interview that was characteristically Reidian. Besides calling Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul — the last two are his colleagues — losers, he also called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “a lump of coal” and said that Senator John McCain told him a few weeks ago, “I’m going to kick the shit out of you.” (This was not the first time McCain had said this. The former presidential candidate told New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich in 2013, “I’m going to go kick the crap out of Harry Reid.”)
Reid said he told him, “John, if I were in your position, I would do the same.”
The 2016 candidates shouldn’t feel too bad. Reid has said similiar things to GOP presidential candidates — and presidents — in the past. He once called George W. Bush a “loser,” and told him “your dog is fat” when visiting the Oval Office. Reid called former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney “kind of a joke.”
Reid told CNBC that he has far more cordial conversations with Bill Clinton, who ends all of their phone calls by saying, “Harry, I love you.”
