Hillary Clinton explained yesterday what she likes about Paul Ryan. It’s certainly not that she suddenly agrees with Mitt Romney’s former vice presidential running mate on much of anything. But he and her Democratic friend, Patty Murray, together made Washington work—one time, at least, in 2013.

If Clinton runs for president and wins, she’ll apparently try to turn Washington into “a nice warm purple space” for compromise where there now exists, well, almost none. That’s the vision she laid out at a Silicon Valley technology conference and it’s not entirely a pipe dream, Clinton told the assembled women.

The red-blue détente that Clinton praised Tuesday as proof of a better way was the budget agreement that Murray, the diminutive senior senator from Washington state, negotiated with Ryan, the conservative Wisconsin congressman. “They actually talked to each other,” Clinton said, feigning shock. “They didn’t show up at a big conference table, with phalanxes of true believers on each side of them, with notebooks filled with argumentation. They had breakfast together. They had lunch together. They’d sit and talk about what each of them wanted, knowing that they couldn’t agree on giving each other everything, but how could they make enough decisions to reach a consensus? And they did. So it’s possible.”