LAS VEGAS — In a crackling campaign debate, Republican challenger Sharron Angle attacked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday night as a career politician who lives in a fashionable Washington condominium and has voted to raise taxes 300 times. The four-term veteran called his Tea Party-backed rival extreme and accused her of distorting his record.
“I have never voted for tax breaks for people who are here illegally,” he said, rebutting one of the allegations Angle has made in their close, caustic and costly campaign for the Senate.
Angle played the aggressor from the opening moments of the hour-long debate, at one point taunting him to “man up, Harry Reid” as she urged him to concede that Social Security faces financial difficulty.
Across a stage at a local PBS station, there was little or nothing the two agreed on — not taxes, not health care, immigration, energy policy or federal spending.
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, it’s not your job to create jobs,” she replied sharply. “It’s your job to create policy” that leads to the creation of jobs.
With their debate, Reid and his challenger shared a local stage and a national spotlight, the only joint appearance of a campaign pitting the embodiment of the Democratic establishment against a challenger who was little known outside Nevada before winning the nomination in an upset.
For Angle, a 61-year-old former state lawmaker, the encounter was a chance to counter Reid’s months-long attack on her as an extremist bent on destroying Social Security and other government programs.
For Reid, 70 and seeking a fifth Senate term, it marked an opportunity to persuade skeptical constituents that he deserves re-election at a time when unemployment in Nevada, at 14.4 percent, is the highest in the country.
Under the debate ground rules, moderator Mitch Fox posed questions to the candidates by turn and at one point asked Angle the same question twice after she sidestepped when asked if health insurance companies should be bound by any coverage mandates.
“The solutions to the health care insurance cost problems are simple, and they reside within the free market,” she said.
Reid pounced on her reply.
“Insurance companies don’t do things out of the goodness of their heart; they do it because of the profit motive,” he said. “We need them to be forced into” covering mammograms, colonoscopies and other tests, as well as autism and other conditions.
Both candidates unveiled new television attack ads in the hours leading up to the debate.
Former President Bill Clinton campaigned with Reid earlier in the week and urged voters not to take their anger over the economy out on the four- term senator.
But Angle jolted Democrats in the state and in Washington when her campaign announced it had raised $14 million in the three months ending Sept. 30.
