I'm sympathetic to David Schorr's defense of bipartisanship, but I think it slightly misses the point. "Recently," write Schorr, "when I was on an Iowa Public Radio talk show with my conservative co-editor Tod Lindberg, he made the important point that these documents tell the next president which approaches and ideas s/he could find broad support for. And that's the other key thing about bipartisanship, whatever the outcome in November the reality of our two-party system is that broad support will be a sine qua non for almost anything important we want to do." When talking about bipartisanship, it's always worth defining who the relevant parties are. Tod Lindberg's a great guy, a bright guy, but he's not got much political heft. And this is true for a lot of exercises in cross-party communication. The agreement of two policy elites does not make for operational bipartisanship. If I sat down with conservative health policy wonk Michael Cannon, we could probably figure out a couple points of compromise and fashion some useful programs out of that. But Cannon's opinion isn't relevant -- it's the Republican Senators who matter, and they're listening to interest groups and donors, not think tank officials or policy journalists. Those of us frustrated by the veneration of bipartisanship are, in part, frustrated by this particular misreading the landscape. It's easy for people of good faith to get together and compromise on their ideas. What's hard is getting people of power together to compromise on their interests. Lots of folks achieve the former and seem to think they've pointed the way for the latter. They haven't.
