And in theory, I could play third base for the Yankees. The truth is that after years of complaining about obstructionism, Democrats have developed a sudden taste for the stuff; there's a substantial faction of both politicians and voters who want the Democrats to stand by and do nothing, nothing, that Republicans might like. And even among those who think they want bipartisan compromise — well, I spend a lot of time listening to those folks, and when you get down to it, frequently their idea of a "compromise" is that they get a huge government program that costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and Republicans get trivial increases in the size of health savings accounts, and maybe to twiddle with a few of the outer decimal points on growth rates. In other words, what they think is a vision of compromise is too often actually a vision of America circa 1992, when Republicans were a minority party who had to come begging for crumbs.