Via Chris Hayes, David Sirota makes an all too overlooked point about "bipartisanship":
Washington pundits like David "Voters Shouldn't Decide Elections" Brooks and Mort "Democrats, GOP Should Heed Voters' Call for Moderation" Kondracke would have us believe that the most important objective in politics is to get Establishment Republicans and Establishment Democrats to embrace each other, say nice things about each other, and work together on things, regardless of what those things actually do for - and to - the country at large. But at the end of the day, ordinary people outside the political elite-o-sphere don't care what the partisan sponsorship of this or that legislation is - all they care about is what the legislation actually DOES.
I'm not saying bipartisanship is necessarily bad. But I'm also not saying it is automatically good. If two people here in Helena, one Republican and one Democrat, help an elderly woman load her groceries into her car, that's good bipartisanship. If those same two people then punch the woman in the face, steal her car, drive over her legs and leave her for dead in the parking lot, I'm gonna say that's bad bipartisanship. In other words, bipartisanship is value-neutral, despite the Establishment's best efforts to equate "bipartisan" with "totally awesome" in the public's mind.
That's quite correct. It's evidence, too, of the punditocracy's preference for process over ideas, particularly when Democrats are in office. On some level, that makes sense: If you live in Washington and spend all your days scrutinizing and watching the legislative sausage being made, it's natural for you to be oh-so-concerned about the aesthetics of the process. If you're eating the sausage, however, what matters is that it's delicious.
Additionally, very few pundits are directly affected by the legislation they report on, but they are all invested in the process by which it's created. So you get a lot of observers applauding the Gang of 14 agreement that allowed a virulently anti-Roe judge on the Supreme Court because, in point of fact, wealthy white men don't have to worry about getting abortions. That said, on the few issues where legislation does have a direct effect on their lives -- tax rates, say -- you tend to see much more concern over outcomes.
