Left-leaning Michael Kinsley has an interesting take on partisan bickering in the latest TIME:

This postpartisan era everybody wants is not going to happen, and the great longing for it is childish. What Americans say they want–or even what they think they want–needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Their objection, very often, is less to politics than to arithmetic. Do they want our health-care system fixed? Yes. Do they want Social Security and Medicare on a more solid footing? Absolutely. Will they pay for these things? Not a chance. There are no pragmatic, nonideological solutions to the big question of what the government should do and what it shouldn’t. You can have your government programs and pay for them, like a good liberal, or you can have your tax cuts and forgo the programs, like a good conservative. Asking for both is the opposite of pragmatic.