A Good Faith Effort Is What I Want

The media has criticized Obama for the failure of his bipartisan gestures towards Republicans. But I've felt for a while that this gets the essence of bipartisanship wrong. And in this week's profile of Rahm Emanuel in the New Yorker, he gets at the real essence:

[Emanuel's] task has been made no easier by Obama’s desire for bipartisanship, which Emanuel argues the press has misunderstood. “The public wants bipartisanship,” he said. “We just have to try. We don’t have to succeed.”

Yes. What's important here is for Obama to show a good faith effort to work with the other side. If the other side simply wants to be the Party of No, that's their problem. Obama gets this and, as a recent Times poll shows, it's working: he has a job approval rating of 63%. More specifically, people feel that he has been working in a bipartisan fashion, but that he should still stick to his policies. For some reason I get the impression the cable news media has not been able to understand this, but this has never been very complicated to me. For the public, being bipartisan simply means debating constructively in the way that most people hold up as an ideal in their own lives when working through their own issues. It doesn't mean that you can't follow your own individual (i.e. partisan) goals, it just means you have to be reasonable and respectful in how you achieve them.