After Tuesday's elections, Anderson better gear up for a tough couple of years. He appears to have alienated the council he will have to work with for the rest of his second term. His standing at the Utah Legislature is about as good as Prince Charles' in Belfast. His relationship with most of his fellow Democrats in Utah is chilly. And the neighboring local officials in Davis and Utah counties, well, hate him.

Other than that, life is pretty good for Rocky. He still gets awards from international environmental groups (a Utah term for "terrorists"), national gay rights organizations consider him a hero and Iraq war protesters make him their keynote speaker.

Whether any of those support groups can help him get anything done for the city remains to be seen.

Anderson's "take-no-prisoners" approach to politics was front and center in the off-year municipal election when he vehemently went after Council Member Eric Jergensen, whose votes on the mayor's pet issues have made their relationship tense.

Anderson wrote a letter to voters blasting Jergensen for "dragging his feet" on issues critical to Jergensen's Avenues area, a piece Jergensen supporters decried as unfair exaggerations. Now, with Jergensen's re-election, Anderson still has to deal with his votes on his pet issues.

Anderson was less involved in the race for the council district in the Rose Park area. But the incumbent and winner, Carlton Christensen, has felt the sting of the mayor's complaints that the council has sometimes catered to the desires of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the detriment of the city's best interest.

Christensen and Jergensen are both Republican and conservative, compared to the mayor's liberal Democratic roots. But the one Democrat-leaning council candidate who actually did win Tuesday, Soren Simonsen, was pretty much ignored by Anderson, so he may feel no allegiance to the mayor, who is likely to be in the cross hairs of many of the City Council members. Dave Buhler, another Republican on the council, has also been the brunt of Anderson's ire and, like Jergensen, is already being talked about as a possible mayoral election opponent should Anderson try for a third term in 2007.

Meanwhile, the city's hopes of using as leverage Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s need of Democratic votes in the House to get his settlement agreement on the Legacy Parkway approved were dashed when the Democratic caucus did not unify as a solid bloc and Republicans saw they could get those votes that they needed without giving the Democrats a bone.

The Democrats had hoped they could use their leverage to get the state to kick in a few million dollars toward a Union Pacific project to reconstruct a rail bottleneck on the city's west side that would allow the removal of a controversial rail line that runs through west-side residential neighborhoods and past a school.

House Speaker Greg Curtis had said for weeks that he didn't have enough votes in his Republican caucus to reach the magic number of 38 for the majority needed to pass the settlement. There are 56 Republicans in the House and, as it turned out, 34 of them voted for the settlement. Sixteen of the 19 Democrats voted for settlement without securing any promises from the Republicans.

Now, the funding proposal for the railroad project will be decided by the Legislature without any strings attached and Republican lawmakers have made it clear they have no urge to do anything that would make Rocky Anderson happy.

One legislator said the state representatives in Davis and Weber counties will probably never forgive Anderson for joining a lawsuit that blocked the Legacy project for years and will do no favors for Salt Lake City. Utah County, a hotbed of conservative thought, is full of lawmakers weary of Anderson's "liberal" causes.

And the Democratic caucus itself has a number of members who have been on the sharp end of Anderson barbs when they have differed with the mayor on certain issues.

So the city, in the end, had no leverage.

Compare that scenario to a time in the 1980s when the Republicans needed the small band of Democrats to pass Gov. Norm Bangerter's $100 million-plus tax increase.

A third of the Republicans balked at any tax increase. There were only 14 Democrats in the House and six in the Senate. But their votes were needed to pass the Republican governor's plan. So they made a deal.

In return for their votes, the Democrats were able to force the Republicans to increase the income level to which poor families were exempted from paying income tax. That took tens of thousands of families off the tax roll. To make up the lost income, they eliminated the federal income tax deduction, which hit wealthy taxpayers the hardest.

It was a great coup for the Democrats. Of course, the Republicans restored much of the federal income tax deduction in the ensuing years.

prolly@sltrib.com