It has been a lazy trope in both ideological aisles of the new media to attack out-of-touch beltway arrogance and the institutional myopia of the traditional media for these and other sins, especially as story after story emerges about the very real pain being felt by average Americans during this Great Recession. But at no point before has it become as essential to Democratic leadership both in D.C. and in state capitals across America to extricate themselves from this pettiness and abandon these parlor games as it is today.

Unfortunately, the success which Barack Obama achieved in 2008 on a message of comity, bipartisanship and good feeling will make doing so doubly difficult.

Human psychology in a period of economic difficulty is not complex. As individuals and communities, people will often come together in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to help and support one another. But when the dust has settled and the immediate crisis is over, the fingers inevitably start pointing. Scapegoats are inevitably found as a part of the coping process--even in cases of unavoidable natural disasters, to say nothing of man-made crises like military defeats or economic collapses. It's a story as old as Pericles, and as potentially disastrous as the Weimar Republic.

In the economic crisis of 2008, the scapegoat was clear and unmistakable. The downturn had a single face not only for Democrats, but also for many Republicans: George Bush.

In that context, Obama did not need to name a scapegoat. The scapegoat was sitting right there in the Oval Office. Obama simply needed to promise a new beginning: hope for a renewed America; change from the old way of doing things; a commitment to work with politicians on both sides of the aisle to fix America's problems. And it worked. It worked not because Obama caught the golden ring of bipartisanship in the parlor game, but because he best reflected a departure in style, appearance and substance from George Bush, America's accepted national scapegoat.

Fast forward to 2010, and Bush is no longer an effective scapegoat. An argument can easily be made that he should be, and that President Obama cannot be expected to fix a crisis of this magnitude, created through decades of neglect, in just one year. It could be said that Democratic leadership should have continued to use Bush as a whipping post in the same way that Republicans used Jimmy Carter for decades. But from a political point of view, the era of the easy, automatic scapegoat is over. Like a bad dream, the American public has done its best to wash the Bush Administration out of its collective memory, and the Democratic Party now owns this crisis one way or another.

But as the economic hits keep coming, Americans will find a new, alternative scapegoat.

And that, more than anything else, is what makes the continued beltway obsession with with its silly parlor games so dangerous today. The American people don't care about bipartisanship, but rather solutions. It seems commonsense to most people in their everyday experiences that solving problems often comes about through negotiating disagreements, so bipartisanship tends to poll well in theory. But most Americans don't understand the way Washington works, or the degree to which the GOP refuses to cooperate in the process of actual governance. In the absence of actual solutions to problems, Americans will settle for punishing a scapegoat. And as we know all too well from history, the scapegoat that gets punished all too often has little bearing on the reality of cause and effect, or the actual perpetrators of the crisis.

In short, without quick solutions to complex problems and without a ready-made scapegoat like George Bush appropriately was in 2008, the American people will settle for punishing the first available scapegoat they're told to punish in 2010. It's unavoidable.

Right now, in the absence of a Democratic message that clearly articulates the economic evils perpetrated by the corporate pluocratic class, that scapegoat is likely to be the "Other": persons of color on welfare, urban intellectuals and union workers with government paychecks, and anyone else falsely presumed to be reaping economic benefits at the expense of the ordinary American. Down that road lies massive electoral defeat in 2010--and ominously worse eventualities should the decade enter a long, jobless "recovery".

If only one Party is giving the public a scapegoat to blame, that Party is going to win no matter how nonsensical the choice of scapegoat appears to be. Fortunately, the Democratic Party has no shortage of very real villains to blame, but it will require enduring the tut-tuts of "class warfare" from all the Georgetown cocktail salons. Still, all the hearty approval from the Milbanks and Broders in the world won't help Democrats when it comes time to pay the piper in 2010 and beyond.