He also is showing this year that when it comes to hardball politics, the leaders in the Senate are neophytes by comparison, even with the elevation to Senate majority leader of Curtis Bramble of Provo, who was supposed to be a kick-butt bulldog.

The most important pet project for Curtis this year was getting the funding package done for the Real Salt Lake soccer stadium in Curtis' home town of Sandy. The most important pet project for Bramble and Senate President John Valentine of Orem was elevating the status of Utah Valley State College to a university, with the name Utah Valley University.

Soccer would mean all sorts of economic development opportunities for Curtis' Sandy and university status would mean federal funding opportunities, and increased status for Valentine's and Bramble's Utah County.

The classic deal-making scenario between the leaders of the two bodies would feature this give and take: You pass soccer and we'll pass the university proposal.

But as P.T. Barnum once said: "There is a sucker born every minute."

When Salt Lake County was hedging on its part of the soccer stadium funding plan, Curtis went into drama mode, telling the press that soccer was dead, he was going to stop his efforts to get the package passed and work instead to funnel the sales tax money earmarked for the stadium into projects for Salt Lake County, including TRAX light-rail extensions.

That did two things. It created a sense of dread among those who think professional soccer in Utah is cool, and it played to the xenophobia among some lawmakers in Utah County toward their northern neighbor, the more liberal Salt Lake County.

Those who had been relatively silent, including Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., jumped onto the Real Salt Lake bandwagon and the back-room saga - sans the cigar smoke - was launched. That gave birth to legislation to snatch the needed sales tax money from Salt Lake County, whether county leaders went along or not, and use it for the final piece of the package to get the stadium done.

There was such a frenzy, the House and Senate both passed the bill and Huntsman signed it. Done deal.

But one thing was forgotten. University status for UVSC is still on the table. It hasn't passed yet. And Curtis already has what he wanted.

When the Senate passed the Utah Valley University bill the other day, it went to the House and promptly was placed in the Rules Committee, which is the usual path. But when the first batch of bills was sifted out of Rules and sent to the speaker for committee assignments, the Utah Valley University bill was not among them.

This isn't to say the bill won't come out. It surely will. But there might be a message here that Curtis isn't done using it for leverage. Another of Curtis' passions is elimination of sales tax on food. The Senate favors income tax reduction.

At the beginning of this year's session, Valentine wrote on the Senate majority blog that elimination of the sales tax on food will not happen this year. He expressed the Senate's philosophy that the cuts should be spread among several forms of tax - income, sales and property - and eliminating the food tax was too much of a cut to one of those forms.

The Senate then received a message from the House that Valentine's words were a "shot across the bow," intimating that Valentine had started a war. If the Utah Valley University bill stays in Rules for any length of time, consider it the exclamation point on that earlier threat.