Earlier today on Morning Joe, David Axelrod slammed Republicans for rooting for failure and admitted that the administration made a mistake in believing that the GOP could be bipartisan:
You can’t make a strategic decision to sit on the sidelines and root for failure and then say the President’s not being bipartisan. This President has reached out time and time again.
...We mistakenly believed that in the midst of a crisis that both parties would come together and the Republicans would come together and say "this is a time of national crisis, we want to work with you where we can."
And as you read, since you obviously read the New York Times, the piece on Mitch McConnell telling his caucus, before the President even took office, that we’re not going to cooperate with him on anything because we think if he fails, we win.
That’s not a good prescription for the country.
It's hard to argue with what Axelrod said, because he's right on all counts. And it's good to have him on the record admitting it was a mistake to believe Republicans were operating in good faith. Now that the mistake has been made, the question is whether the lesson has been learned -- not just by the White House, but also by congressional Democrats.
Politically, Democrats need to highlight the GOP's "just say no" intransigence in the mid-term elections, but they also need to examine the rules and customs that give Republicans (especially Mitch McConnell) the power to obstruct.
In that effort, the most important place to start is the Senate's filibuster rule, and there's one easy change that Senate Democrats could implement today: eliminate the dual-track system that allows Senators to filibuster legislation without actually bringing the Senate to a stand-still. If you eliminated the painless filibuster, senators would have the exact same right to filibuster that they have today, but when they did filibuster, they'd actually have to take to the floor and hold up progress, making them accountable for their obstruction.
Ironically, that simple change in Senate procedure would almost certainly lead to increased bipartisanship, because the best way to get political opponents to work with you is to let them know that you're willing -- and able -- to go it alone.