LAS VEGAS — The debate Thursday evening between Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Sharron Angle, the Republican running with Tea Party support, had been promoted as a climactic duel between two opponents for a Nevada Senate seat, locked in an exceedingly tight contest in what may well be the most closely watched race of the fall.
What viewers saw here was a vivid contrast of philosophy between two competing forces in American politics this election cycle: Mr. Reid, the face of the Democratic establishment and champion of President Obama’s policies, and Ms. Angle, the hero of the Tea Party. They offered fundamentally different visions of the role of government in dealing with issues including health care, regulating banks and the insurance industry, and using government programs to create jobs.
Mr. Reid said he viewed the role of government as creating jobs, pointing, for example, to federal projects like the Boulder Dam, now known as the Hoover Dam.
“My job is to create jobs,” he said, looking into the camera as he addressed a state burdened with the highest unemployment rate in the nation. “What she is talking about is extreme: We have to do it.”
Ms. Angle looked over at her opponent and also to the camera. “Harry Reid,” she said, “it’s not your job to create jobs. It’s your job to create policies that create confidence in the private sector so they can create jobs.”
Ms. Angle said she opposed forcing insurance companies to cover any kind of procedures — including mammograms and colonoscopies — arguing that these decisions should be left to the private market. “America is a country of choices, not forcing people to buy things they don’t need,” she said, adding, “The free market will weed out those companies who don’t offer as many choices.”
Mr. Reid, in defending the health care law passed this year, argued that that kind of coverage was essential to hold down insurance costs by allowing doctors to catch diseases before they progressed too far and by guarding the public’s health. “Insurance companies don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts,” he said. “They do it out of the profit motive.”
The 60-minute encounter at the PBS station here, the only one the two candidates are scheduled to have, included attacks from both sides that were often personal. Mr. Reid repeatedly used the word “extreme” to describe Ms. Angle, echoing a central theme of his campaign advertisements.
Ms. Angle started attacking Mr. Reid in her opening remarks.
“The contrast is, I’m not a career politician; I’m a grandmother,” she said, also noting that Mr. Reid lives at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington. And in the closing moments, she said he had gone from a hardscrabble life as the son of a miner in Searchlight to being, as she put it, one of the wealthiest men in the Senate.
“How did that happen?” she demanded.
Mr. Reid seemed taken aback by the suggestion that he had somehow profited from his job as senator. “That really is kind of a low blow,” he said. “I think everybody knows I have been a very successful lawyer. I lived off what I made. Her suggestion that I made money being a senator is false.”
Mr. Reid and Ms. Angle — two candidates who have proved to have an unusual propensity to make the kind of misstatement that haunts them for days — did not appear to make any kind of egregious mistake on Thursday that could, by itself, turn the course of this campaign.
Ms. Angle smiled and laughed, sometimes a bit nervously, at the start of almost every answer. Mr. Reid looked pale and slightly wan at the start, but loosened up — at least for him; his strengths, as he acknowledges, do not include public speaking — as the night went on.
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