Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has portrayed himself as Washington's last reasonable man, pleading that we can find some common ground on almost any issue despite our disagreements if we just listen to each other and open our hearts a little. Republicans complain that it's all just an act—he's just trying to look like the reasonable one, to make his opponents look more intransigent and stubborn and gain the upper hand politically. That may be partly true, even though they don't need his help to look unreasonable; they do a fine job of it all by themselves.

The latest narrative on the gun issue is that the prospects for meaningful legislation are slipping away as the tragedy of Newtown fades from our ridiculously short memories and members of Congress feel little of the public pressure required for them to stand up to the NRA. So Obama has been campaigning for his favored legislation, and yesterday he gave a speech in Colorado, the centerpiece of which was a plea to both sides to cultivate some empathy. Here's an excerpt:

The Republican Party and the environmental movement, through some strange twist of fate, are suffering from similar strategic snags. The GOP has worked itself into a well-documented rebranding tizzy in the months since November, trying to refashion itself into the “exciting party that smiles." The party appears blind to the fact that it's policy, not presentation, that voters outside the base are rejecting.

Last week, I noted the extent to which opposition to same-sex marriage and opposition to abortion are still linked tightly together. With its new anti-abortion law—and long-standing ban on gay marriage—Alabama is the latest state to prove the point:

Alabama lawmakers late Tuesday gave final passage to a measure placing stricter regulations on clinics that provide abortions. […]

The bill requires abortion clinics to use doctors who have approval to admit patients to hospitals in the same city. Some clinics now use doctors from other cities that don’t have local hospital privileges. A similar law in Mississippi is threatening to close that state’s only abortion clinic, which is challenging the law in court.

The Associated Press, whose stylebook is used by lots of different publications, has announced that it will no longer use the term "illegal immigrant." This essentially accepts the argument that advocates for immigrants have been making for some time, namely that the fact that someone immigrated illegally doesn't make them an illegal person, any more than the fact that you got a speeding ticket means you should be labelled an "illegal driver," despite your violation of the law. Unsurprisingly, conservatives were contemptuous of the AP.

When you write for a magazine with a particular ideological bent, it's natural to wonder whether you're being too soft on "your" side. This question comes up more when your side is actually in power, since they're the ones who are implementing policies and making decisions; when the other side is in charge, most of your time is spent documenting and analyzing all the harmful and dangerous things they're doing, and your side is occupied with fighting the ruling party and waiting for its turn. Obviously, politics is a never-ending conflict, and that conflict can produce a certain siege mentality. For instance, when a Democratic president proposes a plan for universal health coverage and Republicans attack it with a campaign of mind-boggling hysteria and dishonesty (death panels!), it's natural to spend a good deal of time correcting the record and defending it, even if you think that plan is less than ideal. There are some people (like Glenn Greenwald) who write largely about one set of issues, and thus may find themselves regularly criticizing a president from the party they're closer to if that party doesn't live up to the standards they hold, but if you write about a range of issues, most of the time you won't be critical of your side for the simple reason that most of the time you agree with what they're doing.

That doesn't mean that by doing so you've abandoned critical thinking. On health care, for instance, my own position was like that of many liberals who wrote a lot about the issue—that the Affordable Care Act had a number of weaknesses and could have been much better than it was, but nevertheless represented an extraordinary advance that would have a positive impact on millions of lives. Did the second part of that position make us unthinking water-carriers? I don't think so, but Matt Welch of Reason might argue that it does. In an article titled "The Death of Contrarianism," Welch laments that while liberals (and liberal magazines) used to be skeptical of liberalism, in the Obama years they've become little more than a bunch of Democratic party apparatchiks. "The reformist urge to cross-examine Democratic policy ideas," he writes, "has fizzled out precisely at the time when those ideas are both ascendant and as questionable as ever." Welch seems to pine for the time when The New Republic was torpedoing Bill Clinton's attempt at health care reform by publishing the policy con artist Betsy McCaughey and beating the drums for the invasion of Iraq, because that represented a healthy contrarianism.

You should read Ed Kilgore's response to Welch, but I'd point out that contrarianism in and of itself is nothing to be proud of.