The only bipartisanship that matters

Ed Kilgore makes an important point: on health care reform, there's a large gap between Congressional Republicans and grassroots Republicans.

Congressional Republicans are uniformly against a public option, but as Kilgore points out, about half of Republicans who don't live or work in DC support a public option.

it's worth emphasizing that the two most credible surveyors of public opinion on this subject, the Kaiser Family Foundation and CBS/New York Times, have both found that at least half of self-identified Republicans favor a well-described public option.

Kilgore argues that the implication of this is that there are two models of bipartisanship when it comes to health care reform: Congressional bipartisanship, and what he calls grassroots bipartisanship.

Congressional bipartisanship means political compromise with Republican leaders who have a far more rigid position than the GOP rank-and-file. Grassroots bipartisanship means delivering on a public option supported overwhelmingly by Democrats and even by a majority of Republicans and independent voters.

That leaves Senate Democrats with two choices:

1. They can pursue Congressional bipartisanship, which will put them at odds with their own base and likely create political cover for Republicans who might otherwise have issues in their base, or

2. They can pursue grassroots bipartisanship, which will put them on the side of an overwhelming majority of Americans and create a schism within the Republican-leaning electorate.

It's really a no-brainer. Grassroots bipartisanship is the only bipartisanship that matters, and it's good to see Senators like Kent Conrad begin moving in that direction.