...and Pelosi apparently is decently strong.  She isn't fantastic, but since the Democrats have controlled the House (07-09), their track record of getting bills out of the House has been pretty good (before those initiatives die in the Senate).  So maybe House Democrats _are_ amenable to a strong leader.

  I honestly don't understand how Reid became the ML in the Senate, or how he stays in that position.  He isn't popular in Nevada, he is rarely complimented (on TV, anyway) by his fellow Democrats, he is surely not popular among Republicans, he isn't charismatic, passionate or manipulative, he has a wretched legacy of Democratic bills dying or being gutted in the Senate, and he isn't the most senior or most decorated or most pedigreed Democratic Senator.  He has been an embarrassment to the country and to the Democratic Party on at least 4 highly-publicized occasions since 2006, and I cannot recall any occasion of him being lauded as politically shrewd or courageous.  Even if the Democratic Senators have shown that they are capable of siding with special interests (or even Republicans) rather than with their constituents on certain issues, it would still be hard to believe that the _majority_ of them are actively happy with a powerless figurehead joke as their "leader" to ensure that nothing substantive gets done.  Maybe a dozen of them sometimes feel this way, but not the mainstream of the Party.  So, again, I don't know how or why he stays.

He should be fired immediately.