But He Said He Wanted To Bring A New Tone To Washington!

Apparently, there really were journalists who took George W. Bush’s transparently meaningless boilerplate about bipartisanship seriously, and thought that someone who sometimes cut deals with one of the most reactionary legislatures in the country would be a moderate in national terms. Huh. It’s doubly surprising that people would be willing to admit it 7 years later, though. Indeed, Wesiberg still seems to think not that he got Bush wrong but that Bush mysteriously changed after roughly his second month in office. Sad.

Let’s just hope we avoid the inevitable Weisberg editorial in 2013: “I can’t believe John McCain turned out to be a conservative!“

…Yglesias has more. Another why of putting it is that when politicians start running on a platform of “keeping everything the same in Washington” and “doing everything I can to destroy cooperation and prevent Congress from solving our problems,” then politicians using bromides about bipartisanship can actually be used to infer something about how they’ll act in office.