New York Times – For a millisecond there was silence in the chamber. Had he lost it? Was he joking? Within half a second, Mr. Reid had switched his vote to “yes.”

And after 25 straight days of bitter, partisan debate, senators on both sides of the aisle busted up laughing.

Mr. Reid, exhausted, briefly hung his head toward his knees. He smiled sheepishly. He gave a huge shrug. His colleagues continued laughing. The clerks moved on to Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, who voted “no” for real.

At a news conference afterward, Mr. Reid joked that his brief “no” vote was an attempt to create a spirit of bipartisanship – a reference to the unanimous opposition to the health care measure of Senate Republicans.

But, in fact, he had not been kidding. He had gotten lost in the moment, on the edge of accomplishing one of the most excruciatingly difficult tasks in modern American political history, uniting the entire Democratic caucus to pass the bill after decades of failed efforts to revamp the nation’s health care system.

“To be honest, I’d like to say I was trying to be funny or create some bipartisanship,” Mr. Reid said in an interview. “But I was just in dreamland, thinking about where we had come. Some said ‘oh bipartisanship or trying to be funny.’ It was neither quite frankly. It was just, I am bushed.”

“And,” he added, “I don’t mean George Bushed.”