In contrast to my last post, I'm going to keep this one brief.

There's been no shortage of lot of talk lately about bipartisanship as a way forward.  Of course, we all know that the President has made this one of his central themes in assuming office.  Over the course of watching the stimulus legislation, many pundits have been all too happy to pronounce this notion DOA.  If you want to be completely cynical about it, you could say that it was a naive notion to begin with.

But perhaps that's because it's been so hard to find moderates in the minority at this point.  The Congressional GOP took the stimulus negotiations as an opportunity, some would say predictably, to make political moves instead of embracing bipartisan negotiations in earnest.  At the end of the day, there seemed to be far more on the other side of the aisle who were willing to slap the hand away than to grab hold of it.

Then there's the ongoing discussion about how the GOP finds its way out of the wilderness.  Maybe Michael Steele is the man for the job.  However, if he's to be successful at it, maybe he should lend an ear to more moderate Republicans like California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yesterday, Schwarzenegger had a sit down with ole Georgie S. over at ABC.  Schwarzenegger becomes a compelling Republican counterpart to Barack Obama's overtures of disagreeing without being disagreeable.  Indeed, he even acknowledges the shortcomings of ideology and the importance of being willing to work together to solve problems in spite of ideological differences.

As I discussed in my last post, the Governator knows a thing or two about how the political process can go off the rails when certain parties adhere immutably to their ideological positions.

UPDATE: To see an example of another direction that the GOP might decide to go in, check this out (hat tip Andrew Sullivan):

UPDATE THE SECOND: Here in California, the GOP is already taking up the business of punitive (if largely theatric) measures against its members who voted for passage of the state budget, as this article describes.  As the article notes, the final product was the result of a plan based on covering the deficit with tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing, thus representing a compromise from all sides of the argument, but you only get your GOP gold star if you oppose all taxes under all circumstances from here to eternity.  Will the national GOP take a similar tack?