And then there was the low-key assistant Democratic leader from Nevada whom one Democratic leadership aide referred to as "the Jim Whisperer." Sen. Harry Reid, after all, was the man who lobbied Jeffords for weeks, reassuring the Republican senator through the most dramatic party jump in recent memory.

Reid worked his magic on Jeffords with lots of assistance from Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who sealed the deal when Jeffords was ready, as well as others from the Democratic Senate caucus, like Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. But plugging along for weeks, talking to Jeffords on the phone and the floor of the Senate, making him feel at ease among the Democrats, pushing him, prodding him, was the Jim Whisperer. And when no other Democrat would offer up a committee chairmanship to Jeffords should he leave the Republicans, it was Reid who gave up what would have been a job helming the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Reid, in the words of Nevada political observer Jon Ralston, is "the best and most ruthless deal-maker Nevada has ever seen." Any account of Reid's podunk-to-power life would include lots of mentions of "grit" and "pluck," though even those close to him acknowledge, one after the other, that he can also be aptly described as "ruthless."

That trait seems to come in particularly handy when the matter at hand is party-switching. Jeffords, for instance, isn't the first Republican Reid has helped talk into switching parties. Paradoxically, Reid won his 1986 Senate seat in no small part by slamming his Democrat-turned-Republican opponent for that very action, painting him as an opportunist with no party allegiance.

"His quiet demeanor and unflamboyant style disguises an amazingly determined politician," says Jim Mulhall, a Nevada Democratic political consultant.

All of it comes packaged in a quiet and laconic man, self-effacing and averse to media attention (and awkward before the press). "I'm not very good at talking about myself," Reid says in a Thursday interview. "I am who I am, and that's who I've always been, and I'm not going to change."

He even passes on a chance to explain how he convinced Jeffords to make such a historic flip. "That's between me and him," he says. And he's not popping open the champagne. "This is a time of somberness as far as I'm concerned. This is a big responsibility we're taking on. This isn't time for gloating."

Born in a small cabin in Searchlight, Nev., raised by a hard-rock miner father with an eighth-grade education and a mother who was a high school dropout and did laundry for the town, Reid had to go to another town, Henderson, to attend Basic High School in the 1950s. He would board with locals in Henderson during the week and hitchhike home on weekends back to his family's modest Searchlight home, which lacked indoor plumbing.

Says his high school history teacher, Donal "Mike" O'Callaghan: "He's got a band of steel up his backbone there." O'Callaghan also served as senior class advisor when Reid was student body president, and was his boxing coach at the Henderson Boys Club. "It's the same way he was in the ring. You could knock him down, but he didn't stay down." And he had focus. "Lot of fighters come back to the corner so excited they don't listen," he says. "Not Harry. Even back in corner he'd be quiet. He would listen."

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