bi-partisanship is a four letter word

The Republican Guru Grover Norquist was recently quoted to the effect that "bi partisanship is the equivalent of date rape."

There's an image!

I see his point, though, and I see his point of view. I don't agree with him, but I understand where he is coming from.

He sees the world as black and white, us versus them, we are right and they are wrong. Politics is a zero sum game. If someone else is in power that's unacceptable. They have no right to govern because they are wrong. He is smart, anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong but criminal or crazy.

Makes complete sense that there can be no reconciliation or cooperation, if that's how one sees the world.

That is not, however, the way the world really is.

It is true, though, that the last eight years were dominated by a continuing "date rape" perpetrated by the Republican Party--even when the Democrats were in the majority, toward the end. A president with the slimmest margin of victory in history (if, indeed, he had any such margin) governed as though he received 80% of the vote and he got away with it.

There was no give and take, during the Bush administration. It was all take--unless you worked for a living and received wages, then you gave, and gave, and gave.

Mr. Norquist seems to be projecting, then. What his "side" did is what he thinks will be done to him because that is what he thinks reality is.

It would be nice if it could be shown that he is wrong--that compromise is possible in which everyone gives a little to get a little.

I don't know if that will happen, but there is a danger even if it does.

It is entirely possible that so many compromises can be made that what is done is ineffective and then the doer will be made to look wrong in the future when the compromise turns out to have sabotaged the mission the legislation set out to accomplish.

The income tax, for example, was so watered down by concessions made to get it implemented that it's not really progressive and there are plenty of ways that middle class tax payers have had the burden of funding government shifted to them (can you say capital gains income versus income on salaries--including social security).

And asking for compromise after compromise after compromise can become a tactic to blunt the effort and so ensure Democratic failure that Republicans can run on in two years.

Date rape. Yeah. If Norquist continues to use that phrase then, like "class warfare," those I hear use it the most will be, in my mind, the most likely to engage in it.

So, a Lily to Mr. Norquist.

How am I going to know?

I could go on for a while about the election of Bark Obama--what it means and what it doesn't mean to me.

I'll sum it up.

I chose Obama over Hillary because he seemed to be saying that we need to get people together and work things out together while she seemed to be hanging on to the approach that we get things done by consolidating our power and riding down on our enemies to defeat them.

I like what I saw as the "Obama approach" because it is like (although hardly identical to) what is called "Quaker process."

I wish he would have talked about that more in the campaign but he obliquely referred to it from time to time, frequently enough to keep me going.

Now, we see.

He has won by a substantial margin and only the most partisan would claim that he does not have a "mandate" to move forward as he has talked about doing. But one of the ways he got that mandate was by trying to move beyond the red state-blue state, left-right approach--or at least claiming that's what he wanted to do.

I'll know it's what I voted for if he approaches problems in an inclusive way, listening to those with whom he disagrees and trying to fashion compromises that both get the job at hand done and that build enough support for those compromises to get them implemented.

If a man with a mandate can govern as though he just barely won he can get things done and unify the country.

We have just lived through eight years in which someone who just barely won swaggered around like he had a mandate and we are living with the aftermath.

"Look upon my works, Ye Mighty, and Despair."