Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has bad news for ambitious Democratic governors with their eyes on the White House in 2016.
“I think most everyone knows if [Hillary Clinton] wants to run for President, she’s going to get that nomination,” he told a small group of reporters during a roundtable discussion in his Capitol suite Wednesday afternoon.
Reid called the (potential) primary while contextualizing the GOP’s obsession with the administration’s messaging in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi last year.
“To keep going over this thing, day after day, on things that have been in the public record for months and months, it’s obvious that it’s an attempt to embarrass President Obama and to embarrass Hillary Clinton,” Reid said, before assessing the Democratic primary field.
Reid acknowledged that the Benghazi attacks raise legitimate national security questions — just not the ones Republicans are hyper-focused on.
“The Speaker says he’s obsessed with this and it appears that’s the case,” Reid snarked. “There are terrorists — really that’s a new part of the world that we have to understand. There are terrorists who want to do us harm. You, your family, for no reason that we can appreciate or comprehend. That’s what we should be doing, is spending our time determining how we’re going to handle the terrorists, whether that’s economic means to make people feel better or whether it’s more security-directed stuff.”
Instead, Republicans have harnessed themselves to the allegation that the Obama administration wanted to cover up the fact that there had been a terrorist attack — a contention that feeds a much uglier conspiracy theory.
“Republicans are doing everything they can to ratchet back more security for embassies,” Reid said. “This is just a sideshow, trying to embarrass Obama and Clinton.”
