Reid's First Ad of the General Election

Now that Harry Reid has an opponent for reelection this fall, he has wasted no time in going up with his first TV ad of the 2010 race. You can see it here, courtesy of the Las Vegas Sun.

It's a quiet, well-put-together spot that focuses on solar construction jobs generated in Nevada. "These solar jobs wouldn't be here without Harry Reid," says solar construction worker Tim Gardner. "It's that simple."

Polls show Reid's race against Angle as a toss-up. Rasmussen has Angle ahead 11%; Las Vegas Review Journal/Mason-Dixon has her ahead by 3%; Daily Kos/Research 2000 has Reid up by 6%. All polls were taken in June. Hotline OnCall reports that Reid has already spent $1.5 million on ads, though this, his first ad of the general election, marks the beginning of his fight against Angle.

Reid is facing Tea-Party-backed Sharron Angle, who views government in drastically different terms than Reid does, wanting to do away with the Education Department and phase out Social Security. The ad plays to skepticisms with Tea-Party-style fiscal conservatism--non-supporters, and those on the fence, see it as a selfish, fantastical and Quixotic, untethered to the realities of how government functions and what people need from it--and Reid's ad presents the Senate majority leader as a bottom-line guy.

An on-screen graphic reads "No one can do more."

The beauty of Reid's ads is their bluntness in expressing Reid's power. He's debatably the second-most powerful elected Democrat in the country, and his ads present this in stark language. See this ad from November 2009, which casts him as "the most powerful senator Nevada has ever had":