Corrente's Vastleft, having previously pledged to review Obama's The Audacity of Hope chapter-by-chapter, has given up, after reading the chapter on bipartisanship. He provides a condensed version of Obama's thesis supported with fairly detailed notes, and I can make it ever shorter: "Republicans have been doing horrible things, but it would be wrong of us to say what the Republicans have been doing is horrible."
In a way, it's surprising I agree so much with VL's conclusions, as I'm more of a centrist than he and wouldn mind certain sorts of bipartisanship and moderation. The problem is the book amounts to a storm of contradictory cliches. They could be turned into something nuanced, but not by Obama. There is nothing that approaches the wisdom, say, of trying to move away from the tendency to stick strictly to the party line on some issues, or on trying to find a reasonable minority among today's Republicans, or using them as a check on Democratic blindness on some points.
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