Just a reminder: Obama's no "post-partisan"

Six months into the president’s term, you don’t read much about this post-partisan future anymore. It may be because on almost every big-ticket legislative item (the stimulus, climate change, and now health care), Mr. Obama has been pushing a highly ideological agenda with little (and in some cases zero) support from across the aisle. Yet far from stating the obvious—that sitting in the Oval Office is a very partisan president—the press corps is allowing Mr. Obama to evade the issue by coming up with novel redefinitions…

Back when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office, the press routinely characterized almost everything he and the GOP Congress did as partisan. While it’s true that some parts of his agenda were passed on a purely partisan basis—most notably, the 2003 tax cuts pushed through the Senate with the deciding vote cast by Vice President Dick Cheney—this was the exception rather than the rule. In fact, many of the most far-reaching bills pushed by President Bush—the Patriot Act, the war-funding bills, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit, etc.—were in the end passed with a healthy number of Democratic votes.

In itself, of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with opting to forgo bipartisanship support for the sake of getting your ideas through. That, however, is not what Candidate Obama promised.