Reid is responsible for Democrat intransigence on the budget

Politico:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been the most ardent proponent of President Barack Obama taking a hard line with House Republicans in the latest fiscal crisis engulfing Washington.

And so far, Reid is getting his way.

When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting, according to several people familiar with the situation. Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn’t attend such a session. Obama scrapped it.

As Washington barrels forward to the first government shutdown in 17 years on Tuesday, the wily Reid has taken the lead role in pushing a hardball Democratic legislative strategy that can be summed up like this: Make the Republicans cave.
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Democrats may pay a high price for this strategy as the Republicans have made vulnerable red state Democrats vote for unpopular previsions of Obamacare and those votes will come back to haunt them in 2014 ad campaigns.  The polling is already showing that voters do not like the no compromise attitude of Obama and the Democrats.