So, the Tea Partiers are now ordinary citizens, more concerned about the deficit than partisan politics. I wonder how that will square with their demands that the government keep its hands off their Medicare.

And will they now support 'Obamacare', because it will reduce the deficit by $70 billion over the next ten years?

Only time will tell.

Mike McGinn's historic role is to generate among the locals nostalgic warm and fuzzy memories of the good old days under Greg Nickels. As for expecting on the national level a serious debate over debt reduction and co-opting the Tea Baggers as "ordinary citizens and taxpayers, more independent than partisan, who rejected complacency for involvement", in the near term that will turn out to be cock-eyed optimism. For that degree of rationality to take hold the level of fear and anger would need to greatly decrease. And there would need to be a sober recognition that our many problems are not merely temporary inconveniences but structural defects that will require time and effort to root out. Such an epiphany may eventually occur, but it's at least a couple of years further down the road. Meanwhile, the myth of American Exceptionalism and its attendant self-involved lunacy can be expected to take a couple of more victory laps around the track.

I'd be surprised if we saw "serious." After all, while we can see the cliff, we're not quite yet at the edge. It's politicians' nature to ignore the obvious until it's the last minute. Evidence: Medicare, which recent reports indicate is only paying about 1/3 of the costs that most recipients incur. No wonder it's expected to go belly-up by 2017! Yet, we hear the politicians talking about Social Security reform all the time. While it's great that they're talking about that program in advance, Medicare/Medicaid is the big elephant in the room. This month, bipartisanship only "blossomed" because the Rs held all other business hostage, saying that nothing would happen unless the tax cuts for the rich - which includes themselves, incidentally - were renewed. Once that happened, a whole flood of other legislation that they had held up: tax cuts being extended for the non-rich, extending unemployment insurance for the chronically unemployed (benefits already extended 7x), the START treaty, health care for 9/11 responders, don't ask/don't tell. I haven't heard about passage of the proposed $250 to Social Security recipients, who have had no COLAs of late. All of this "bipartisanship" hinged on those tax cuts for the rich, that's the primary story here. Re: Obama returning to consensus-seeking language: it sure looks like it's for a reason, he should've been making it public if he was doing it before-and the non-results due to the Rs stonewalling, plus he's also entering his re-election campaign phase. He didn't have time to read about divided government in the Senate, as he wasn't there long enough, nor could he foretell what was to come. On the other hand, he could've looked into it the past several months given the oft-repeated predictions of R victories. The Republicans now control the U.S. House, but they've controlled the U.S. Senate in the past year with their Senators representing but 39% of the U.S. population by sticking together and employing the filibuster over and over (see http://fixthesenatenow.org/). What might happen is the liberal Ds and the Tea Partiers getting together to cut defense spending for the plethora of overseas bases plus the wars. They may not have the numbers, though. Fortunately for the U.S. taxpayer, unlike the traditional Rs, the Tea Partiers don't leave anything off the table when it comes to cuts, and the defense establishment is full of opportunities.