Since pitchers and catchers are working out down south – you know what I’d like to see this baseball season?  I’d like to see all of the teams in the major leagues work together, so that all of them win the World Series this season!

Absurd?  Of course.  To most of us.

But to those who fuss over “bipartisanship”? Not as absurd, as Thomas Frank points out in a partly-correct series of observations in the WSJ:

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies — not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.

The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it’s only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.

As anyone familiar with the incestuous relationship between the media and the left in Minnesota knows, Frank has it only partly correct.   The media do see themselves as technically impartial, but they’re not; they’ve merely redefined their own biases as “the norm” as far as the public is concerned.

“Bipartisanship” means “everybody working together to do things our way”; see every Lori Sturdevant column ever written for prime examples of how this manifests in real life.

Frank does get this part right:

It is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age. But in some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise. The role of the political parties is merely to cancel each other out, so that only the glorious centrists remain, triangulating majestically between obnoxious extremes.

…before proving that he is himself from Planet Beltway:

What’s more, bipartisanship’s boosters can’t even discern friend from foe. The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which seems to be growing even more conservative as its numbers shrink, has clearly resumed the strategies of the early Gingrich era — obstruction, bomb-throwing and more obstruction. But to the mainstream media, the angry Republican pols seem to mainly discredit Mr. Obama, who failed to win over the GOP. Which will, of course, encourage the bitter-enders to obstruct even more.

Never has Beltway orthodoxy looked as clueless and futile as it does today. Confronted with the greatest failure of economic ideas in decades, it demands that the president make common cause with people for whom those failed ideas are still sacred. To think we can solve our problems in this way is like hoping to chart a route to the moon by water.

That’d be the cheap irony of this situation; the Republicans spent the last four years as they did the years from 1936 to 1976; governing like Democrats.

We have political parties because people believe different things; while at the end of the day people will reach a compromise (provided they don’t run back to their corner of the country and grab their followers and their weapons – and after 233 years, we’re still avoiding that fairly well), the point, as I wrote last year, is not to cast away the highlights of ones own beliefs cheaply, but to pull like mad for them to affect and inform the final compromise.

In other words, “Bipartisanship” comes after you reach the final result of everyone pulling for their partisan beliefs.
They say “politics isn’t bean-bag”; it’s not just because some people ignore common civility.  “Politics” comes from the same root as “polite”; it’s not just the art of compromise,but the art of advantageous compromise; of “Getting to Yes”.

I’m going to give a wedgie – rhetorically, probably – to the next idiot “journalist” to carp about “bipartisanship”.
(Via Chad the Tweeter)