Chuck Schumer continued his exuberant cheerleading for Harry Reid yesterday, in keeping with his insistence that he doesn’t have designs on Mr. Reid’s majority leader post. On Morning Joe, he called the Senate Majority Leader “a great, great bringer-of us-together.” Then, at an afternoon news conference, Mr. Schumer called Mr. Reid “the impresario, the great chef.”
Mr. Schumer then looked down and pointed to his own tie. “I have this tie on here: it has eggs and cheese and pork. So, it’s a great omelet. Harry made a great omelet. You sometimes have to break a few eggs to make a great omelet, but he did. He’s a great chef. We have very good cheese from the Finance Committee and pork from the HELP Committee. I couldn’t say pork from the Finance Committee or I’d be in trouble.”
Some of the pork, it seems, came straight from the chef. As the Times reported this morning, “the measure that emerged from Mr. Reid’s office contained a special $100 million in Medicaid money for ‘certain states recovering from a major disaster,'” which may have helped get Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu on board.
Senator Schumer seems more confident in Mr. Reid’s wrangling than even the majority leader himself. Mr. Schumer insisted on Morning Joe that Mr. Reid will get the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, while Mr. Reid has only said, in his more understated way: “We’ll find out when the votes are taken.”