I chose the first supplemental to examine, but the nature of these bipartisan votes is basically the same.  It goes like this.  The public is against a policy idea, and the bipartisan elites push it through anyway, and then, because it's bipartisan, no party can be held accountable for their choices.  If everyone's at fault no one can be blamed, right?  I chose the first funding bill to go through rather than the initial vote for war.  The initial vote for war was popular, though public opinion was always more complicated than just 'yay war', so that was not exactly the right case to examine.  But the same dynamics were obviously in play with the war vote.

Clearly, we are dealing with an extremely conservative set of decision-makers in DC within both parties and a public that is completely cut out of the process.  That is bipartisanship, by the numbers.  The vote authorizing the war in Iraq was a bipartisan vote, and partisanship would have stopped it.  Five years later, wiretapping authority has been expanded and legalized by a bipartisan majority; partisanship would have stopped it.  The Military Commissions Act which destroyed habeas corpus and legalized torture passed by a bipartisan vote; partisanship would have stopped it.  Every attempt to reign in the national security authoritarian state has been beaten back by a bipartisan majority; partisanship would have pushed to roll it back.  In fact, if we could just get Democrats to consistently vote the way the public would like on issue after issue, this would be a progressive country.  Partisanship in other words would mean a progressive country responsive to the public, and bipartisanship means an authoritarian country where the public is cut out.

Though Stoller's examples are primarily in the foreign policy spheres, the same dynamics work the domestic sphere, only there things like universal health care and progressive taxation often don't even get to a vote.

In Edwards's powerful closing speech Edwards makes it clear halfway through that he intends to unite ordinary Americans outside the beltway based on these bread and butter economic interests and the resting of power away from the Beltway set:  

I want to be absolutely clear that the corporate greed that is destroying the middle class of this country and stealing your children's future, it is stealing the future of Democrats' children, Independents' children, Republicans' children. I'm telling you, this is a message and a cause we can unite America around.

(Emphasis Added)

It's also perfectly captured in this exchange:

He condemns wealthy corporate CEOs and "paid mercenaries" in Iraq with equal fervor. They are destroying the future of America.

"When will this stop?" he cried out at a rally in Knoxville, Iowa, on Saturday.

"With you!" a voice responds from the audience.

"With you and with me," he replied.

Edwards is following in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt's 'Trust Busting' and Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, that won FDR the scorn of the moneyed interests, but united Americans in a way hardly seen since.  But what it really brings to mind for me is the missed Presidency of RFK, and the passion RFK brought to fighting against poverty and for social and political justice.  One can carry any political analogy too far, but it's no mistake that we haven't seen a serious Presidential candidate talk about poverty like this in forty years, a candidate who's been on the inside and rejected it.

We can and should try to make the American people more united, but to do that we have to do a little dividing in Washington, and that's OK with me even if it makes the DC cocktail crowd and a few Democratic politicians uncomfortable.

Cross Posted at DailyKos