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By Karoun Demirjian (contact) 
Friday, March 18, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.
Harry Reid
John Boehner
Sun coverage
It’s been more than a month since Democrats and Republicans drew lines in the sand over federal budget cuts, but the weeks of angry words and accusations have done nothing to bring the sides closer to a compromise.
So Sen. Harry Reid is taking a different approach. He’s trying to woo John Boehner.
“I have to hand a bouquet to Speaker Boehner,” Reid said following the Senate’s approval of a three-week patch to fund the federal government Thursday, on the heels of a rocky House passage the day before. “He realized he didn’t have enough votes to go with Republicans ... so he went to Democrats and said we need some votes.
“That’s the attitude that we need to keep moving forward.”
The majority leader hasn’t actually been sending the speaker bouquets of flowers, but Reid has appeared to take extra pains in the past few days to reserve kind words for Boehner, making sure to cast aspersions on the Tea Party when he talks about who’s to blame for the impasse — as if it were a separate entity from the Republican Party and not a wholly owned subsidiary.
“The Republican plan ... is the same plan the Tea Party already pushed through the House,” Reid said March 7, before the Senate took up the House-approved budget bill, which failed. “Now the same Tea Party is trying to push it through the Senate.”
And a week later, when Boehner, of Ohio, lost the support of much of the Tea Party for a short-term budget resolution (it died with the help of 85 Democrats), Reid applauded him.
“What has happened in the last 24 hours makes me think more of John Boehner,” Reid said Wednesday, congratulating him for “getting help from Democrats” and acting in the spirit of 19th-century House Speaker Henry Clay’s adage that “all legislation is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.”
The message is a clear form of tough-love flattery: Boehner, you’re not such a bad guy, the Democrats are saying, but man, those Tea Partyers are holding you down.
But the strategy behind it — divide-and-conquer — is a risky game when words and actions have the potential to resonate in the 2012 elections.
In trying to bring Republicans to the center, Reid could end up pushing the party farther to the right.
Reid isn’t the first to notice a fissure in Republican ranks, but by targeting it, he’s betting that House Republicans will use the Democrats’ invitation as a way to escape the pressure of their Tea Party wing, opening the door to more compromises.
“He’s trying to drive the wedge ... and some Republicans will fall for it every single time,” said Chuck Muth, a conservative strategist in Nevada.
But concerns about the budget, and the national debt ceiling, which the country is on course to crash into in the first half of April, are not the only things on Republican minds. As GOP lawmakers survey the political landscape in 2012, Nevada Reps. Dean Heller and Joe Heck among them, each faces a choice over how to fashion a candidacy: as a pragmatist or as a principled conservative.
Although Reid’s pat-on-the-back political absolution could help gain Republicans centrists in a general election, his blessings could be poison in a primary.
“If I’m a candidate for Congress, and somehow I’m able to show that one of my opponents was praised by Harry Reid in a Republican primary, that could be very bad,” Muth said. “It’s very Machiavellian of Reid.”
Although that could be part of Reid’s strategy — remember, while Tea Party candidates swept the nation, in Nevada, Reid bested Sharron Angle because of her ultraconservative connections — others say the Democrat’s new way with words is designed only to have an indirect effect on the stump.
In 2012, “I think the parties are going to be judged by what they get done in large part, so Sen. Reid’s strategy is to get something done,” Nevada-based Democratic strategist Dan Hart said. “He sees the traditional Republicans as easier to work with and less destructive to the process.”
Several Tea Party members have flexed their collective muscle during the budget standoff, with the most vocal advocating a hastening of a government shutdown if their demands for cuts are not met.
“These freshmen ... simply don’t believe there can be a positive role for government to sustain the middle class,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio.
But Republicans haven’t shown any signs they’re willing to disown them, even in the wake of votes where the Tea Party tells Republican leadership its approaches to fixing the economy are just as objectionable as Democrats’.
“It’s up to the Senate and the White House to offer a credible plan to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year,” Boehner said after Tuesday’s vote, in which 54 Republicans — including Heller — refused to support the speaker’s short-term continuing resolution. “The House is listening to the American people, and it’s time the Democrats who run Washington do the same.”
Boehner knows that if the Federal Government shuts down, Wisconsin will look like a Tea Party in comparison.
Why on earth does ANYBODY listen to Chuck Moot?
Boehner needs to get right or he'll be history. Shut it down and get it right.
dave 202 Your an idiot and a perfect example of the failures of the Tea Party. Most Tea Party nut jobs do not have the first idea of how governemnt works and for the most part they are nit wits with nothing else to do but raise hell and make noise about issues they can't spell let alone undestand. The Tea Party will die just as Palin,Angle and others have done. In the end they will self destruct with thier stupidity.
Boehner just wants to play golf,drink himself into a stupper and find a willing woman.
In their efforts to reduce the size of government and help bring the country's budget under control, how many Tea Partiers have proposed that their own salaries and benefits be cut? I'm not saying that Democrats or Republicans have been saints in this matter. But the TPs have been particularly vocal with regard to less government, so I would expect we'd see them lead by example. So again, how many have proposed this?
And the once super majority dems criticize the repubs...Wow! These idiots had two years to take care of the first two budgets and as yet it still has not been done. They were too busy shoving legislation we did not want down our throats....So lets quit being hypocrites and get the budget done make the cuts...QUIT SPENDING!!
"It's very Machiavellian of Reid."
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And i bet Senator Reid laughed his a** off when he heard that Sharron Angle is running again, you betcha. :-)
The talk radio crowd, like Moot etc. is over blown. On Friday, at 10:41 AM, the station KXNT ran a "fake filler ad" on the Limbow Rush Hate Talk Radio show. They can't even get paying ads. The teabags lost. (Angle, etc.)
People pay too much attention to ditto heads. (I have 4 Art Bell "Versacorders" recording all hate talk stations in town, and that probably accounts for half their ratings. I do it as a public service for a mysterious Billionaire who is bringing us the communist caliphate.) The Steve Warp show went off the air 2/28/2011 and so did KDOX radio.
Look at the ratings...
http://www.radio-info.com/markets/las-ve...
More people watch I LOVE LUCY re-runs
Love the headline!