Lee says he has no problems with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Mike Lee steps out of Cruz's shadow

Sen. Mike Lee was Sen. Ted Cruz’s right-hand man throughout the 16-day government shutdown, pushing the tea party strategy that pitted Republicans against each other in a nasty intraparty battle over Obamacare.

How times have changed.


In the month since the shutdown heavily damaged his party, the first-term Utah Republican is methodically trying to show activists, conservative voters and his colleagues that he’s more than an unyielding, no-compromise conservative. He has been delivering a series of high-profile speeches calling for a mix of populist policies that he says would broaden the appeal of the conservative base beyond just being seen as an angry movement vehemently opposed to Obama’s Washington.

And in an interview with POLITICO, Lee said Republicans shouldn’t tie Obamacare-defunding provisions to the next spending bill to keep agencies running past Jan. 15, a significant concession that could make it easier for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner to unify their party.

( PHOTOS: Key quotes from Ted Cruz)

“We’re in a totally different position than where we were before because it’s now been funded past the Jan. 1 start date,” Lee said, referring to the implementation of major portions of the health law in the new year. “Different circumstances require different strategies for our party.”

Asked whether it made sense to insist on a defunding of the health care law in the next fiscal fight, Lee said matter of factly: “No. I would love to have that, I’m just saying in the position that we’re in, I don’t think that’s a strategy that is going to work.”

In a way, Lee’s comments are in line with the rhetoric he has been espousing in the aftermath of the shutdown , which took a significant toll on his popularity back home and could cause problems for him in his 2016 reelection bid.

Lee has called for a “conservative reform agenda,” something that would promote government action to target poverty in America and encourage upward mobility among middle-class and poorer Americans. His agenda calls for proposals like an overhaul of the criminal justice system by allowing nonviolent inmates greater opportunity to reintegrate with society; providing an additional $2,500 per-child tax credit; and more flexible comp-time policies allowing workers to choose between days off and monetary compensation for working overtime.

Indeed, Lee is calling for a cease-fire between the warring tea party and establishment wings of his party, while pushing the right to embrace an agenda that he believes could appeal to independent voters who will determine control of Congress in the 2014 midterms.

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“We tried to bridge that gap over the years with a lot of tactics and personalities and some spin of course, but it doesn’t work,” Lee said. “I think more to reunify the movement, the best way to do that is to find new and innovative affirmative ideas. … It’s not enough to be against things that are bad, but we also have to be in favor of things that are good.”

It’s a far cry from Lee’s defund-Obamacare push that infuriated many Republicans by making them appear weak fighting a law their party collectively hates. Some GOP senators think Lee got roped into the wrong crowd.

“Mike Lee is kind of viewed to be a nice guy who probably wishes he didn’t know Ted Cruz as well as he did,” said one fellow GOP senator who requested anonymity.

But Lee says he has no problems with Cruz — and is unapologetic of going that route last month, saying, “You never regret doing the right thing.”

Still, Lee added: “There are always things we could do to improve the quality of the message.”

Lee’s new push comes at a key time for his own political career. The tea party senator saw his own political standing tumble in the middle of the government shutdown fight, with a Brigham Young University poll last month showing the senator’s approval ratings dropping 10 points in four months to 40 percent.

Moreover, a group of political heavy hitters, including former Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt, are leading an effort called Count My Vote to change the nominating system in Utah. A key test will come next April when the organizers have to overcome Utah’s tough balloting rules to get the measure on the November 2014 ballot.

The current nominating process now relies on a convention of several thousand staunchly conservative delegates to play an outsize role selecting the party’s nominee. But Leavitt’s group is pushing for a straight primary process where a few hundred thousand more Utah GOP voters with diverse views would choose the nominee, something that would have profound implications for Lee’s reelection fight for a second term in 2016.

Indeed, it was in 2010 when the Utah GOP convention delegates rejected then-Sen. Bob Bennett, paving the way for Lee’s nomination and eventual election on a tea party wave.

But in the aftermath of the shutdown fight, some Utah Republicans are eager to back a challenger to Lee, someone in the mold of more moderate and business-minded Republicans like Bennett, Leavitt and former Gov. Jon Huntsman — a prospect that would grow if the convention system goes away.

“It is true that we’ve had a number of donors, volunteers, etc., who believe that a direct primary will allow more mainstream Republicans and Democrats to get elected,” said Kirk Jowers, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, who is helping lead the campaign to change the primary system.

Such a move could also force Lee to ramp up his fundraising game. He had just $390,000 cash in the bank through the end of last quarter, despite an aggressive fundraising appeal to his donors in the run-up to the shutdown.

In the interview, Lee said he’s not worried about the politics back home, and he insists that’s not what’s driving his call for a broader and softer political agenda. But Lee also supports sticking to the current convention system, saying going to a straight primary would allow candidates to skip “flyover counties” where small pockets of voters reside in rural areas.

“I have yet to hear an argument as to why we should get rid of the current process,” Lee said. “But look, I’ll function in any system that we end up going to.”

Despite positioning himself as an outsider, the 42-year-old Lee has long-standing ties to Washington, given that his father, Rex Lee, served as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. The younger Lee, who grew up in Washington and Utah, served as a Senate page at a time when his current colleague from Utah, Sen. Orrin Hatch, was already serving in the Senate. After getting his law degree from Brigham Young University, Lee clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, when he was a federal appeals court judge, before returning to Utah to practice law and serve as an assistant U.S. attorney.

When he was elected to the Senate, Lee helped co-found the Senate’s Tea Party Caucus, but that group petered out with little fanfare. And even though Hatch was his senior senator and faced a tea party challenger in his primary, Lee declined to endorse his colleague.

But in an interview this week, Hatch said he plans to endorse Lee in 2016.

Reminded about Lee’s snub last year, Hatch said: “That’s OK, I don’t expect people to be like I am. … That’s a long way, way away. That’s a question that you really can’t answer right now. Yeah I intend to support my colleague.”

In this session of Congress, Lee — who has taken an interest in pushing visa overhaul proposals — entered into discussions with a bipartisan group developing a comprehensive immigration bill. But he never signed onto the group’s deal and later became a staunch critic of the comprehensive bill that passed the Senate in June.

It wasn’t until after that point in mid-summer where Lee’s notoriety particularly began to grow on the right. After huddling with Cruz and key outside groups, Lee circulated a letter calling on his colleagues to reject any spending bill that would allow Obamacare to move forward. Despite the steep political odds, the issue picked up steam in conservative circles, and Cruz later emerged as the public face of the effort after his 21-hour speech on the Senate floor calling on his GOP colleagues to join their cause.

But Lee also suffered much of the blame from his own party after House Republicans initially agreed to that approach.

“Republican infighting is, I think, sometimes the result of the fact that we are so accustomed – for good reason – to fighting against the things we are against,” Lee said. “Once you get into that mode, it’s hard to get out of it.”

In the wake of the shutdown, Lee said political leaders have a “real obligation” to put forward a unifying political agenda.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re becoming part of the establishment, it means we can’t rely on tactics, and personalities and spin alone to make our case,” Lee said. “We have to have a real agenda.”