Must We Fear the Rhetoric of Bipartisanship in an Obama Era?

I realize that "bipartisanship" has been functioning maddeningly for a decade now as code for endless Democratic capitulation to wildly unpopular and conspicuously ruinous and often illegal Republican misdeeds, but it need not always work that way. It will indeed be palpably absurd when completely discredited and irrelevant Harold Ford and Joe Lieberman types try to spin the election result as a victory for bipartisanship in the old DLC mode that mischaracterized right wing politics as "centrist" and ignoring the concerns of your liberal constituents to enact elite agendas "populist." After all, how can you claim Obama to be the most liberal senator in Washington, a Black Panther, a Marxist socialist all the way up to Election Day and then claim after the landslide that moderation and centrism and corporate-militarist capitulation have been affirmed by the Nation? (I mean, I know, I know, these are people who simultaneously claim Obama to be a radical Christian in Rev. Wright's Church and a radical Muslim taking orders from the Taliban, so consistency isn't exactly their strong suit.) But, I am personally pleased that Obama has managed to keep intact his low negatives among so many conservatives and independents as well as his high positives among most liberals and progressives, all this despite being pretty clear that he wants to end the occupation, tax the rich and corporations, treat healthcare as a right, and invest in public works and social programs. What all this says to me is that Obama is in a position to actually demand from Republicans a bipartisanship that crosses the aisle from their discredited, unpopular, marginal ideological positions to work with his administration and Democrats more generally to enact the actually-sensible, actually-popular, actually-mainstream progressive agenda. When the Center really is the Center, when the popular really is popular, when the serious really is substantiated, it seems to me Democrats may have less to fear from a rhetoric of bipartisanship than we have done over the last decade. Needless to say, all this remains to be seen, but I am guardedly hopeful for now.