Poor Ez.

He asks, "Can the president be bipartisan?"

Skip questioning whether the Pope is Catholic or asking about a bear defacating in the woods... I ask: Can a former Journolist ever again be trusted to offer up neutral, even-handed analysis or economic advice?

Nevermind sounding "defeated". He sounds outright ... irrelevant now, unable to make a convincing argument, reduced by the facts on the ground into realizing -- finally -- that he's not so much a superpolicy wonk influencing discussion as he is an academic counting the angels dancing on the heads of pins**...

It’s possible that none of this would work, of course.* Perhaps coal-state Democrats would join with denialist Republicans and fight cap-and-trade. But at least you’d get points for being bipartisan, right?

Wrong. What I’ve described is, of course, the Obama White House’s agenda, which borrows many ideas from the Republican Party of the mid-1990s and early-Aughts, and has not been treated as particularly bipartisan. In my column this week, I wrote that this was, in part, because bipartisanship doesn’t mean what Democrats think it means. A “bipartisan bill” isn’t a bill that includes ideas from both parties. It’s a bill that includes votes from both parties. That’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell means when he says “President Obama needs to decide between his goal of higher taxes, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit.” A bill that includes ideas from both parties won’t be bipartisan, because Republicans won’t vote for it. A bill that only includes Republican ideas can be bipartisan, because Republicans will vote for it.

But after writing this morning’s post on the Republican report that recommended the exact deficit-reduction package that the Republican leadership ultimately walked out on, I realized that even that definition of “bipartisan” doesn’t quite get it right. Rather, a “bipartisan” bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as bipartisan, while a partisan bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as partisan. That puts the agency where it belongs: on the minority party. The idea that the president can “be bipartisan” is dead wrong. He can be partisan, designing bills that the opposing party would never want to vote for, but he can’t be bipartisan unless the opposing party lets him. And knowing that any reputation he gets for bipartisanship will be used in his reelection campaign, why would they do that?

Defining partisanship that way is a bit like pretending to be a neutral journalist impassionately analyzing facts, instead of a paid organizing shill (via Journolist) for the administration's liberal agenda...

Can't be trusted as an impartial economic analyst now, if ever he was.


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* Would that he had only had this relevation before trumpeting the unconstitutional, middle-of-the-night Christmas Eve passage of the healthcare law as the administration's defining success.

** But a well-paid one, at that. Surely that will be some consolation to his career in the long run?