It’s positive, it’s encouraging, and it points out one of President Obama’s most glaring failures: As much as Obama likes to hem and haw about how Republicans are blocking his agenda items just to be spiteful, he’s the president of the United States, for goodness’ sake. People want to see some leadership, and that excuse only gets you so far for so long. You can accuse the GOP of being unyielding as much as you want, but in our democracy it takes two to tango, and everybody knows it.

In the past couple of presidential debates, I thought Mitt Romney skillfully navigated a few tricky areas by reverting to a “I worked with the other side and we passed legislation on a bipartisan basis during my Massachusetts governorship” line.