Rick Klein of ABCNews is hosting a chat on “who’s most to blame for failures of bipartisanship?”

I responded that I would blame those who expect either of two parties with fundamentally conflicting philosophies to abandon those ideas and worldviews in the name of the “bipartisanship” buzzword. Klein noted, accurately, that Tom DeLay expressed a similar theme in his farewell remarks: “You show me a nation without partisanship, and I’ll show you a tyranny. For all its faults, it is partisanship, based on core principles, that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream, and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders. Indeed, whatever role partisanship may have played in my own retirement today or in the unfriendliness heaped upon other leaders in other times, Republican or Democrat, however unjust, all we can say is that partisanship is the worst means of settling fundamental political differences — except for all the others.”

If a lawmaker thinks a proposal is a bad idea, they shouldn’t sign on out of a misguided sense that comity and decorum require an abandonment of their own judgment. Republicans think that most of Obama’s agenda stinks; most Democrats think that most of the Republicans’ agenda stinks. To contend that either side should suppress their better judgment is to fetishize any agreement that includes folks with both Ds and Rs after their name.

While some might argue that the current makeup of Congress includes too many conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats to come to any serious majority, it’s worth noting that there are still plenty of lawmakers who have proven willing to vote with the other party in the recent past. If a Democrat can’t get Olympia Snowe (lifetime ACU rating 47.8), Susan Collins (49.5) or George Voinovich (69.7) to sign on in the Senate, or Mike Castle (52.2) or Mark Kirk (55.6) or Dave Reichart (56) to sign on in the House, it’s probably not that appealing an idea. Not every GOP lawmaker is a fire-breather. (Alas.)

Likewise, if a Republican proposal can’t get Ben Nelson (47.2) or Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln or Mark Warner or Jim Webb to sign on, the proposal probably already in trouble.

By the way, I note that Obama keeps insisting that the House and Senate versions of the health care bill are 90 percent similar, and that the differences between the two are minor and not worth delaying passage of a bill. (Pelosi: “We’re talking about the fact that our bills are about 75 percent the same, perhaps 80. The president optimistically says 90.” ) This appears to be a reassuring misestimate.

Considering how the bill is polling, how much the country is more worried about the economy, and how much both Obama and Congressional Democrats desperately need accomplishments to tout, they have every incentive to pass a bill and move on to legislation focusing more specifically on the economy. If the two bills really were 90 percent the same, they would have put together a bill that constitutes that 90 percent and passed it already.