On Tuesday, Senate majority leader Harry Reid threw one heck of a book party. His memoir, The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington, just came out in paperback, and to celebrate the occasion the Nevada senator held a fundraiser at Caesar’s Palace. The event, billed under the same title as the book, featured Vegas headliner Bette Midler, as well as Sheryl Crow. But the star of course was Barack Obama, who spent the evening praising Harry Reid and working on his stage banter — “Hello, Las Vegas,” “Give it up for our outstanding performers,” etc. The cost of admission? A mere $2,400 toward Reid’s reelection — the maximum allowable campaign donation.

Most authors would kill to promote their work with these kinds of resources. But having recently read The Good Fight, it seems doubtful to me that even a star-studded party (literally singing the book’s praises) and an endorsement by the leader of the free world can sell this turkey. And given how unintentionally unflattering the book is to its author, Reid would probably be better off keeping the book’s existence quiet.

And it’s been kept pretty quiet so far. Released a year ago, the book got one glowing review: from his hometown paper. Every other major media outlet has been standoffish. Take this blurb from the Washington Post, proudly emblazoned on the back of the paperback edition: “Recounts fights with everyone from classmates to the man who would eventually become his father-in-law, preparing him for a senatorial life of battling the Bush White House and Republican filibusters.” Beware the value-neutral blurb: In fact, the Post never reviewed the book — the quote comes from a gossip column published a month before the book’s release. One of the most powerful men in Washington published a book, and the entire journalistic establishment’s reaction seems to have been, “If you can’t say something nice . . . ”

Of course, Reid doesn’t always have nice things to say himself. While no one expects Reid to praise George W. Bush, the degree to which he is judgmental and catty regarding the former president pretty much speaks for itself. Three pages in, after lamely trying to establish his bipartisan bona fides by talking up George H. W. Bush, Reid shares this charming anecdote about his early days in the Senate: “[Former Texas senator and vice-presidential candidate Lloyd] Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect [H. W.] Bush was. Then he paused and said, ‘But watch out for his wife; she’s a bitch.’ I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsen’s crude advice, I’ve always said that our forty-third president is more his mother than his dad.”

What’s the purpose of recording for posterity a bit of hearsay defaming a woman Reid admits he has no cause to dislike? Is Reid really so petty as to insult someone’s mother? Why yes, yes he is.

Here’s another unintentionally revealing anecdote describing Reid’s relationship with Bush. In a passage describing a meeting the two men had at the White House on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Reid writes: “That day he wore on his face a look of bravado that we’ve all come to know, and said something I will never have the words to adequately describe. But to understand what he said is to understand something profound about the problem at the heart of the administration. Speaking of the fact that the war was being used by radical Islamists for jihadi recruitment, Bush said, ‘Of course, al Qaeda needs new recruits, because we’re killin’ ’em.’ He then gave a smirk — that ‘Bring ’em on’ smirk — that we’ve all come to know. ‘We’re killin’ ’em all,’ he said.”

Oh, the horror. Naturally, this comment of Bush’s is followed up with pages of Reid recollecting the perfectly composed monologue he gave in response. (It also helpfully explains in exacting detail why the surge plan then being considered wouldn’t work, with no acknowledgment in retrospect that it did.)

And here’s what happened two days later: “I publicly said that the war is lost.” Perhaps Reid should have worried that one of the United States’ most powerful politician’s declaring the war lost would be a ginormous jihadi-recruitment tool. But no, after pages of describing what a dangerous, shoot-from-the-hip, totally-unwilling-to-genuflect kind of guy George W. Bush is, Reid responds to the remark that will forever define his political career by reiterating that he won’t apologize for having said it.

“I speak bluntly. Sometimes I can be impulsive. I believe something to be right and do it. And then I don’t worry about it,” Reid writes. Now if that remark were included in George W. Bush’s forthcoming memoirs, it would be held up proof positive that Bush is the short-sighted, close-minded simpleton of the Angry Left’s longstanding caricature. And yet, Reid openly admits to the very leadership style that Democrats — Reid included — supposedly deplored in the 43rd president. Elsewhere in the book, Reid recounts stories that make his political success seem positively baffling. In particular, he retells how he learned the ways of the Senate at the feet of his predecessor as leader of the Senate Democrats, Tom Daschle. Here’s a story about that dynamic duo that contains multitudes:

In the first year of the Clinton administration, Tom and I had the idea to go to the White House and recommend that President Clinton appoint George Mitchell of Maine, who was then Senate Majority Leader, to the Supreme Court. “Why would I do that?” the President responded. “There’s a Republican governor in Maine. He’d appoint a Republican to replace him.” Well, we hadn’t thought of that, but on the walk back to the Capitol, I had said to Daschle, “Tom, when a leadership position comes open, you should run for it. I think you’d do well.” And sure enough, after George Mitchell unexpectedly retired from the Senate in 1994, Daschle had become the Minority Leader, and in 1998 I had become the Minority Whip.

Oh, where to begin. So Reid went to the president and suggested displacing the sitting Senate majority leader without bothering to think about who would replace him? Daschle comes off only mildly better here, as it’s possible to imagine that he was angling all along to get Mitchell out of the Senate so he could assume the role of leading the Senate Democrats himself. But if that’s true, it almost makes Reid look dumber still — carrying Daschle’s water, completely unaware of his motives, and even, gee willikers, suggesting Daschle run for a leadership post.

Thus Reid vacillates between outright spite toward his political enemies and unwarranted fawning over his political allies. And when he’s not at one of those extremes, he’s being outright delusional about himself. Here he is describing his one term as a state legislator beginning in 1969. “I only spent one term in the Nevada assembly, and when I went up to Carson City they called me a liberal. I don’t know why, exactly, as I’ve never been big on labels,” Reid writes. He doesn’t know why they called him a liberal? Let’s refer to the very next paragraph: “At the time I was struggling with a number of other legislators to write a law in the State of Nevada — a law that would be upheld by the court — that under certain conditions would give a woman the right to have an abortion in the first trimester.” This was four years before Roe v. Wade. That might provide a clue to the mystery.

The book’s only redeeming quality is that it’s not entirely about Reid’s political career. Prior to entering national politics, Reid lived a pretty colorful life — he was born into poverty in a small Nevada town where prostitution was the main industry, was a semi-pro boxer for a time, converted to Mormonism, worked as a Capitol police officer in D.C. while going to law school, was a criminal-defense attorney in Las Vegas in the 1960s, and became chairman of the Nevada Gaming commission in the late ’70s, a job that found him dealing with the mob and all sorts of characters.

Despite all this material, though, the only really compelling part of the book is Reid’s retelling of a bizarre murder case in Wyoming, in which he represented the accused. What we have is a 300-page patchwork of pointless political score-settling that tries far too hard to cast his Senate career in the best possible light, interwoven with the underdeveloped memoirs of an unreliable narrator.

Of course, the book’s re-release was but a flimsy pretext for Tuesday’s fundraiser. He’s going to need the money. A poll taken just last week “found that 45 percent of Nevada voters would ‘definitely’ vote against Reid next year — with only 30 percent saying they want to see him return to office.” It seems the only way Reid’s approval ratings could go any lower is if his constituents read his book.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.