Obama Bipartisanship

To many on the left, President Obama is a disappointment. To many on the right, President Obama is a socialist threat to American freedoms. Both of these reactions are based on projections -- the unconscious fantasies of each group projected onto the president.

Given the Republican strategy of take-no-prisoners, the only bipartisanship is capitulation. It's hard to tack back and forth between leadership and appeasement without looking like a captain who's not sure where he's taking the ship. More leadership, please.

Mr. Obama, in general, does not go out of his way to play the glad-handing, ego-stroking presidential role. While he does sometimes offer a ride on Ai...

President Barack Obama reflected on his first term in an interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters to be aired Friday. Walters asked whether he coul...

The change we are experiencing may feel uncomfortable and bumpy, but nobody said change must be seamless. We only know that change must be.

The president can win the bipartisan support of the electorate. Or he can win the support of insiders from both parties, backed by billionaires and corporate think-tanks. But he can't do both.

Aaron Burr was a victim of his own nonpartisanship, his openness to working with political opponents as well as allies. Burr's story illustrates that Americans love nonpartisanship in principle but often disdain it in practice.

For the first two years of his administration, Obama had no overriding narrative, no frame to define his policymaking, no way to make sense of what he was trying to do. As of his 2011 State of the Union Address, he has one: Competitiveness.

I used to imagine the president was playing 11-dimensional political chess with Republicans, a strategy I was too dim to grasp. I've begun to wonder whether his negotiating is his way of dog-whistling to Independents that he's their guy.

Many who listened to President Obama's account of this week's meeting with Republicans believed there was hope for a bipartisan conclusion to the lame duck Congress. What planet do he and they think they're on?

Sam Stein contributed reporting. WASHINGTON -- On the day that Republican leaders were supposed to have a bipartisan meeting and an intimate dinner ...

Mrs. Obama, it seems as if everyone who cares about your husband is talking at him. It doesn't seem as if he hears any of us, but everything we know about your relationship suggests that he does listen to you.

The GOP calls Obama a lying, socialist, Commie mole and he continues to take the high road. To borrow from a religious tradition, no matter how much you love your enemy, sometimes you just have to throw the moneychangers out of the temple.

With all the health care bill's deficiencies, winning its passage would be a triumph, not just for expansion of health coverage, but for Obama's capacity to grow in office and defeat Republican obstruction.

It makes no sense to have the votes needed to carry that position and then give up in the interest of securing additional votes you don't need to placate the feelings of those who oppose your effort.

Obama accepts the center as the space to start the problem solving. It sounds so right. But there's a difference between ending up in the center and beginning there.

March 2010 will either be remembered as the month when the scales fell from Barack Obama's eyes and he realized that the bipartisan fantasy, given the current Republican Party, is a fool's errand.

WASHINGTON — Determined to have a deficit commission with or without Congress' backing, President Barack Obama plans to announce on Thursday tha...

Everyone remembers that George W. Bush's first tax cut was contentious when Congress considered it back in 2001. So contentious, in fact, that the Bus...

If voters reject the Dems in November, it won't be because they legislated too far to the left, or to the right: It will be because they were outflanked by their opposition and didn't get to legislate at all.