With left-of-center columnists critiquing the Beltway obsession with bipartisanship even in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, it's no wonder that David Broder is upset (Washington Post, 2/19/09). He calls the idea that Obama should stop worrying so much about attracting Republican support "the worst advice he has received," warning that without reaching out to Republicans, Obama won't be able to "offset protectionist impulses among Democrats," and "Democrats will never tackle Social Security." Horrors!

To be fair, Broder does suggest that Obama can only achieve some other more progressive goals via bipartisanship, but his argument on these issues is farther-fetched:

When it comes to energy, regional and commodity interests will inevitably divide the Democrats. They always do. Oil, coal, natural gas and consumer groups will exert their will. If Obama writes off the Republicans in advance, he will end up with a watered-down bill--or nothing.

The problem with this claim is that, if you look at voting patterns, every Republican in both the House and Senate is to the right of every Democrat. While Broder nostalgically recalls the days of "Lyndon Johnson's forging the great civil rights acts with Sen. Everett Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch, and Ronald Reagan's steering his first budget and tax bill through a Democratic House," the parties no longer include the Republican moderates and Democratic boll weevils that made such ideological crossovers possible.

Realistically, Obama will only be able to increase "bipartisan" support for his proposals by shifting them to the right.  Somehow I don't think that's going to keep Broder up nights.

Calling it "obvious" that "promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself," the latest from Thomas Frank (Wall Street Journal, 2/18/09) explains the corporate media's fetish for bipartisanship:

For the Beltway commentariat, however, transcending partisanship is the most meaningful of issues, more important, one senses, than the economic problems that trouble those people at town-hall meetings. "Nothing was more central to [Obama's] victory last fall than his claim that he could break the partisan gridlock in Washington," wrote the Washington Post's David Broder a few weeks ago, in an altogether typical expression of media perceptions.

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.

Frank delineates the really insidious nature of what "is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age": "In some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise." See the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "Bipartisanship=Shifting Right?: Media Mull White House Failures Over Stimulus Partisanship" (2/3/09)

Sometimes iconoclastic Washington pundit E. J. Dionne Jr. comes up with a winner (Washington Post, 2/2/09) in this description of the crucial media role in political chicanery on the national level:

If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the bipartisan bar indefinitely. And each concession to their sensibilities threatens the solidarity in the president's own camp.

That's why last week's unanimous House Republican opposition to the stimulus plan was so important. For the most part, the Republicans escaped attack for rank partisanship. Instead, what should have been hailed as an administration victory was cast in large parts of the media as a kind of defeat: Obama had placed a heavy emphasis on bipartisanship, and he failed to achieve it.

This week's FAIR radio show discusses how,

after several weeks of media debate, the House passed a nearly $900 billion economic stimulus package. White House efforts to reach out to Republicans resulted in exactly zero GOP voters, leaving some in the media to wonder if Obama was failing to deliver on his promises of bipartisanship.

Hear "what about the stimulus debate was entirely off the mark" on CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)

You see some absurd standards being set for how far President-elect Barack Obama should tip his cabinet to the right. Al Kamen in the Washington Post (11/7/07) writes that if "he's serious about this bipartisan thing...then he's going to have to do better than his predecessors, probably putting at least three non-D's in the cabinet ranks, or it will look much like same-old, same-old." He then suggests turning over the departments of State, Defense and Energy to Republicans--because nothing spells "change" like allowing the party in power to keep setting foreign, military and energy policy, does it?

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (11/7/08) writes about "the [Obama] administration of my dreams":

They will actually believe in that stuff Obama says about postpartisan politics. That means there won’t just be a few token liberal Republicans in marginal jobs. There will be people like Robert Gates at Defense and Ray LaHood, Stuart Butler, Diane Ravitch, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Jim Talent at other important jobs.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin? The McCain adviser who recently described Obama's "basic goal" as "taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it"? "Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change"--that Douglas Holtz-Eakin?

Or Jim Talent, who declared less than three months ago that choosing Joe Biden as a running mate "demonstrates that the Obama campaign realizes that Senator Obama doesn’t have the foreign policy credentials or experience to be president"?

These are standards for being "serious" about post- or bipartisanship that are fundamentally non-serious.