Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants everyone to just get over the dustup between his chief of staff and the Obama administration shorty after the midterm elections earlier this month.
Reid, in a New York Times profile of Chief of Staff David Krone, was responding to a Washington Post story where Krone described private conversations with President Obama, a move that, according to the Times, “astonished even some veteran Capitol Hill staffers.” Krone described how he and Reid pleaded in vain with Obama to do more to help Democrats in tough re-election fights.
But Reid shrugged all this off in the profile of Krone.
“He didn’t make it up, you know,” Reid said. The Times asked Reid if the disagreement hurt Senate Democrats’ relationship with the White House. Reid responded that “they should just get over it.”
“I have a good relationship with the president,” Reid said. “This is all staff driven. Get a life. Forget about this.”
Krone’s comments in the Post were pretty scathing.
“I don’t think that the political team at the White House truly was up to speed and up to par doing what needed to get done,” Krone told the Post just after the midterm election.
He also said that “No member of the Democratic caucus screwed up the rollout of that health-care Web site,” adding that “yet they paid the price — every one of them.”
Here are other tidbits from the Krone profile:
- Krone once flipped out when, during negotiations on the fiscal cliff in 2012, Secret Service agents began screening staffers coming in with congressional leaders (oftentimes the staffers just go through with their bosses).
- Krone ended up skipping an engagement party for him and his fiancée, Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former White House staffer, because he had an meeting with George E. Norcross, a prominent Democratic political boss in South Jersey. Krone “later admired a photo of the cake served at the party, describing it as “like taller than me.”
- Krone, like Reid doesn’t drink. Krone, who the Times made sure to note has climbed Mount Everest, also doesn’t smoke. “I don’t smoke and I don’t drink, and it’s not —I mean with him it’s obviously religious and deep feelings,” Krone said. “For me it was just who I am.”
