Partisanship?

Again, the Democrats need to stop listening to what the conservative press is telling them.

Democrats preparing to take control of Congress for the first time in over a decade are looking to the Republican takeover in 1995 as an object lesson of what to emulate and what to avoid. They hope to match the legislative energy of the Newt Gingrich era while avoiding at all costs the partisan pitfalls that eventually soured voters on the GOP.

It wasn’t just partisanship that soured the voters on the Republicans. What soured them is doing things that the public didn't want them to do, like lying to them, taking the country to war, cutting taxes for the super rich, allowing jobs to go overseas, colluding with the oil companies to illegally increase profits, illegal domestic wiretapping, the Medicare prescription drug law . . . do I need to go on? That's what soured the American public--passing laws counter to the wishes of the public--and in this case, that was different than simple partisanship. If they were doing something partisan that the voters wanted them to do, I don't believe the voters would have had a problem with it. The difference was that the opinion polls were showing them that they were doing things contrary to what the public wanted, yet they did it anyway. That’s what got them voted out of power.

So the Democrats don't simply need to be bipartisan for the sake of being bipartisan and working together in harmony with the Republicans. They need to do what the American public, and especially that part of the American public that elected them, wants them to do. If that includes working with the Republicans on a specific issue then fine, but they don't need to compromise on John Bolton or privatizing Social Security. That's not what the people who elected them--progressives and democrats--want them to do. And we need to keep on top of them to remind them why they are there and what our priorities are.

Oh, and the Washington Post needs to stop trying to project their opinions on the Democrats and tell them what to do--and the Democrats had better not be listening.