He says he’s "moving on," but there must have been some reason why Senator McCain chose to publish a caustic, supercilious and patronizing attack on Senator Obama for choosing a different course on lobbying reform.  Senator McCain would like to assemble a "task force"; Senator Obama, joined by most of his Democratic colleagues, would prefer to work through the regular committee process.  This, as Mr. McCain would have it, is a test of commitment to bipartisanship, and Mr. Obama supposedly failed it.

      Bipartisanship:  those storied moments when two sides, normally separated by political interests and substantive disagreement, come together, unified by the urgent demands of consensus.  It is hailed in foreign policy, and its absence in much of domestic policy is sorrowfully noted.  It seems that it is an objective, for McCain and others, in lobbying reform.  See Rick Hasen's post here.   

      Bipartisanship has irresistible partisan appeal, when—as in the Abramoff matter—one party, the party in power, stands suspected of countenancing and conniving in corruption and naturally wishes to share the pain.  This is a paradox of bipartisanship:  its partisan uses.  Senator McCain will serve his party well by casting the lobbying reform debate in these terms—as an institutional issue, requiring a bipartisan institutional response—rather than as the measures required to answer one party’s ethical failings. 

     This is one political advantage to McCain, and there is another, closely related:  as one of his party’s likely and very much leading Presidential candidates, McCain strengthens his already well-recognized, assiduously cultivated public standing as Congressional leader and reformer, as both a senior Republican but, on some central questions, an Independent.  Bipartisanship works for Senator McCain, in lobbying reform as elsewhere:  it works politically, and helps him realize goals quite partisan in nature.

      For Senator McCain to succeed in this effort, he must be able to distinguish the partisan from the bipartisan, and he has proposed to do so, with wide support from the press, on his own authority.  This has been his aim in lobbying reform, and when frustrated in aims personally and—in this instance—politically important to him, it is his practice to assail, in vituperative terms and a righteous tone, those who contest his judgments. 

     In other words, in providing partisan cover for his party and no small measure of political benefit to himself, the Senator demands control of the debate and of the process and questions the motives and personal ethics of colleagues with different views.  By contrast, good, honest partisan disagreement—and partisan accountability—have rarely looked better. 

Bob Bauer