The term McMansion is rarely used in a positive manner. Yet, a recent profile of former Senator Harry Reid’s life after politics describes his home as a McMansion:

Early on the afternoon of Dec. 11, about an hour after an Oval Office meeting between President Trump, the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and the incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi devolved on live TV into a shouting match — a “tinkle contest with a skunk,” in Pelosi’s postgame grandiloquence — I pulled up to a McMansion in a gated community outside Las Vegas. I presented my ID and pre-issued bar-code pass to a security guard. Another guard emerged from a sedan in the driveway, instructed me to leave my rental car across the street and pointed me to the front door.

And a later paragraph says more about the location of the home:

Reid has decided to live out his last years in Henderson, a fast-growing and transient Las Vegas suburb. His house is in the upscale Anthem neighborhood: a fortified village of beige dwellings of various sizes and otherwise indistinguishable appearances. There is a Witness Protection Program vibe to the place, accentuated by the security detail.

The descriptions of Reid’s home draw on several traits of McMansions: an “indistinguishable appearance,” located in a gated and wealthy suburban neighborhood. Presumably, the home is large though little is said about this.

To the main point: few people use McMansion as a positive term. By saying that Reid lives in a McMansion, the writer is suggesting the home is a negative. And in the way that Americans tend to operate – what you own says something about you – then Reid himself is a negative figure. This may fit with the overall tenor of the article which suggests Reid is an unusual and odd guy:

One of Reid’s assets as a leader, when he was in office, was his willingness to feed the egos of his colleagues before his own; he was happy to yield credit, attention and TV appearances. Yet when I visited Reid in Nevada, I detected a whiff of, if not neediness per se, maybe a need to remind me that he has not been forgotten. He told me that he received a lovely call that morning from Barbara Boxer, the former Democratic senator from California. He gets calls from his former colleagues all the time, he said, and they tell Reid he is missed. He had a final conversation with John McCain over the summer, just before McCain died, punctuated with “I love you”s.

Reading Reid can be difficult. Is he playing a game or working an angle or even laughing at a private joke he just told himself? When speaking of his final goodbye with McCain, he broke into a strange little grin, his lips pressed upward as if he could have been stifling either amusement or tears. It occurred to me that Reid, typically as self-aware as he is unsentimental, could have been engaged in a gentle playacting of how two old Senate combatants of a fast-vanishing era are supposed to say goodbye to each other for posterity.

Do odd or hard-to-read politicians live in McMansions? Can a leading Senator truly be a person of the people if he lives in a McMansion in a wealthy suburban neighborhood? The choice of calling Reid’s home a McMansion at least hints at these possibilities.