WASHINGTON — When Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid surprised liberals by applauding Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court, he was displaying a hint of disdain for elitists and admiration for a Western lawyer who, like him, pulled herself up by her bootstraps.

Reid, who was raised in a small Nevada mining town and worked his way through law school, alluded in an interview to Miers' struggles as a young woman working part time to pay for her education after her father was incapacitated by a stroke.

"She overcame difficult family circumstances to become the managing partner of a successful 400-lawyer Dallas law firm," Reid said.

He contrasted Miers with Chief Justice John Roberts, the Harvard-educated, blue-chip constitutional lawyer whom Reid voted against.

"As bright and brilliant and as good a lawyer as Judge Roberts was ... he'd never taken a deposition, he'd never picked a jury, never tried a case," Reid said. "She has. We need people like that who have real-life experiences."

Reid has voiced admiration for Miers since he met her about six months ago when she paid a courtesy call upon her appointment as White House counsel.

In a conversation with Internet bloggers last week, before Bush nominated Miers, Reid recounted how he urged Bush to consider her for the court. "I said, 'The vice president got here in a very unusual way. He was chosen by you to find a candidate to be your vice president. You liked the person in charge of finding a candidate better than the people he chose.' I said, 'I think that rather than looking at the people your lawyer's recommending, pick her.' "

Liberals have tried to link Miers, a longtime Bush loyalist, to their denunciations of Bush for cronyism. Even Reid yesterday called for changing "the culture of corruption and cronyism spreading throughout the nation's capital — a culture that led to 'Brownie' at FEMA and the failures of Katrina and the Republican scandals we're now reading about," he said, referring to the government's response to Hurricane Katrina under former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown.

But, speaking to the bloggers, Reid made one thing clear about Miers: "I will include everybody as a crony, but not her, when I make my case."

Reid said in the interview that he wasn't yet committed to vote for Miers' confirmation.