One of the things I’ve long written about was the extent over the last eight (but especially five) years the word “electability” was used in such a way in the press and with DC insiders as to make Republican base voters normative for all America. That is, a Republican candidate is electable if he or she can get Republican base voters to support them, whereas electable Democrats are ones who could be viewed as having a good chance of getting conservative Republicans to vote for them. It’s obviously bunk, but it’s a concept that has been used to push the window in which political debate takes place significantly to the right.

As with Paul Krugman, I think a similar thing has happened regarding the word bipartisanship. In Washington, bipartisanship has to do with the propensity for Democrats to embrace Republican policies and help them get passed. It doesn’t mean compromise, unless you’re a Democrat. It takes Republican policy views (privatizing Social Security, bailing out Wall Street but not Main Street, staying in Iraq indefinitely) and makes them normative. Hence the only Democrats who are seem as being bipartisan are people like Mark Pryor, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln, all of whom happily embrace Republican views from time to time. Naturally Joe Lieberman is the poster child for bipartisanship.

Krugman brings out this dynamic well in a blog post on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s salvo against Democratic partisanship in the context of resisting the privatization of Social Security at the start of Bush’s second term. Krugman gets to the nut of the problem:

So Mr. McConnell regards it as damnably partisan of Democrats not to go along with an attempt to destroy the legacy of the New Deal. Presumably, then, his idea of bipartisanship would be for Democrats and Republicans to work together, harmoniously, to destroy the legacy of the New Deal.

This is exactly right and it’s also exactly what we should expect in coming weeks and months as the GOP and their compliant press  ramp up the pearl clutching over the lack of “bipartisanship” from the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress.

There’s a very simple reason why please for bipartisanship from the press and from the right should be ignored and President Obama has said it himself: he won. Overwhelmingly. The public wants the Obama agenda and have given him a large majority in both legislative chambers to achieve it. As such, bipartisanship is a word that hides its true meaning in Washington. Pleas for bipartisanship are nothing more than pleas for the Republican policy agenda to be implemented while they do not control the White House nor Congress.

I hope that Democrats generally and the Obama team in particular learn to ignore any requests for bipartisanship, as that word does not mean what they want you to think it means.