Congratulations go out to Mike Tomasky, the newly named editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. I'd spend some time gushing about his editorial talents and the crucial role he played in my professional development by giving me a job, but over e-mail he got all bashful in the face of praise and said to "go read my blog post in defense of bipartisanship so you can go back to attacking me." Okay! Mike's post, I think, rewrites history a little bit. He argues that Obama's bipartisanship isn't directed at congressional Republicans. It's directed at the country. "As regards this audience," says Mike, "Obama's bipartisanship is in fact working, and the polls we've seen so far support my thought. He's at an approval rating in the mid-to-high 60s. The Republicans are around 30%." George Foreman once grumbled that Muhammad Ali's boasts about his brilliant rope-a-dope strategy were "like shooting an arrow into a barn, and then painting a bullseye around the arrow." Ali, Foreman thought, hadn't meant to walk into the ring and get punched until his opponent got tired. Rather, it just sort of happened. Similarly, I don't think there's evidence that Obama meant to make substantive concessions to congressional Republicans in the hopes of getting zero votes and taking a message of frustrated bipartisanship to the country. The Obama administration admitted this. "There’s an insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship here and we allowed that to get ahead of ourselves,” reflected Rahm Emanuel. "[The administration] recognized they had overdone their initial outreach to Republicans." But they learned. Adapted. They couldn't get Republican votes, but they could make the Republicans look like petulant obstructionists rather than principled dissenters. Was this the original strategy? Probably not. But no plan survives contact with the enemy. The important thing is that you come up with a new plan. Mike suggests, though, that the current argument over bipartisanship is whether Obama "is right to talk about bipartisanship." That's not quite it: it's whether Obama is right to plan for bipartisanship. As we saw in the stimulus bill, he's not. He can't expect Republican votes. He has to build his political strategy around the assumption that Republicans will act in unified opposition. And he also has to build his message around a country that wants bipartisanship. He's right to talk to Broder, but he has to plan for Cantor.
