From The Hope-n-Change Files

Here's an excerpt from Bill McGurn's Wall Street Journal today (emphasis mine):

In a passage from his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," [Obama] sounds like a Republican complaining about the stimulus. "Genuine bipartisanship," he wrote, "assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith.

"If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this 'compromise' of being 'obstructionist.'"

"For the minority party in such circumstances, 'bipartisanship' comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being 'moderate' or 'centrist.'"

Hm. Very interesting philosophy, don't you think?

The only thing I would dispute about this is that when Republicans were the majority, they put measures in place to ensure the Democrats still had a voice. Remember the first thing Pelosi and the new Democrat majority did in January? They revoked those minority protections.

Hope! Change!

There's my two cents.