OK, so maybe the strategy for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night was to intentionally act like a dead fish and make Stewart work for it. Reid did tell us in an earlier interview about his new book — The Good Fight: Hard Lessons for Searchlight to Washington — that he wasn’t going to try to out-Stewart the longtime host of the show.

Hey, senator: Mission accomplished! We’ve seen dining room tables that exhibited more personality than Reid did in his star turn on last night’s program. (Granted, we may have been drinking before engaging in conversation with the aforementioned dinner tables. Oh, sweet knotty pine: How we love your mellifluous voice.)

It started out harmlessly enough: Stewart seemed to have been truly impressed with the chapters on Reid’s roots in tiny Searchlight, and told the senator so. “You’ve had a remarkable journey, sir,” Stewart said, as Reid sat impassively, saying nothing. “Or am I mistaken?”

Reid only really had the crowd with one line, in which he said his journey was a quintessential American success tale. “In America, if I can make it, anyone can,” he said to applause.

“I think right now they [the audience] are taken aback with your soft spoken, and I’m going to go with humility,” Stewart said, the gravity of his task now dawning on him. This was going to be a long six minutes!

Reid’s second good line — and what seemed like the only natural moment in the entire interview — came after Stewart joked that Reid’s reputation for toughness belied his slight appearance. “And yet as I look across from you I feel like, I could filibuster this man,” he said. Retorted Reid: “Everyone else has, you might as well.”

Stewart tried — like the rest of us — to get Reid to say who he likes for president, with the same result: No dice.

Another natural question: If you have both houses of Congress, why haven’t the Democrats been able to “run roughshod” the way the Republicans always seemed to? “They have the president. We don’t,” Reid explained.

Ah, but don’t think Reid left without using the sound bite de jour: We’re spending $5,000 per second in Iraq. That rightly stunned Stewart, and the audience, too.

Reaction? Not much on the Daily Show site, linked above, save for this, written by somebody called “fede”:

“i am 70% sure, based on the way he talks in this interview, that Harry Reid is a serial killer.”

Ouch, baby! But seriously, can you see Reid with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in his basement dungeon? We can: “It agrees to unanimous consent on this Iraq resolution, or it gets the hose again.”