But, to be fair, the term conservative isn't currently enjoying its heyday, either. Elected conservatives might, as a matter of fact, be more comfortable referring to themselves in these terms, but there is a sizeable section of the electorate that feels exactly the same about conservatives as conservatives do about liberals. Such is the apparent nature of politically polarized America.

Against this background, we find that moderates and independents are lauded for their fair-mindedness and for their electoral utility. They're seen as eschewing extremist ideology in favor of relying on common-sense values that support the common good. Both liberals and conservatives are thought to place principles over persons in an indefensibly mistaken endorsement of partisan politics -- moderates instead praise the noble path of bipartisanship.

"Vote Bipartisan," a political action committee founded by William & Mary undergraduate Brad Hungerman, speaks this language of moderation as an intrinsic good. Rather than voting for candidates based purely on the party they belong to, we are encouraged by Hungerman to consider the actual positions each candidate holds. Parties necessitate partisanship and so we should ignore them as best we can.

But surely a candidate's party-identification is an important part of their manifesto, regardless of whether it is made explicit. Democrats and Republicans are different and stand for different things, despite what some skeptics say, and we would be foolish to neglect these differences in favour of assessing an individual out of their party context -- this merely leads to the politics of personality. Our current president ran, in large part, on this basis and his party-identification ultimately turned out to be far more accurate a predictor of his behavior in the office than his persona.

So this particular bipartisan logic founders because politicians do, in fact, belong to parties, but perhaps citizens do not, or at least not to the same degree, and so a different variety of bipartisanship might be workable. "Vote Bipartisan" offers a potential alternative by suggesting that voters endeavor to deliberately elect split tickets, such as John McCain for the presidency and Mark Warner for Virginia's junior Senate seat. The idea here being that if the branches of government are divided against themselves, the house of democracy will not only not fall but actually prosper. This bipartisanship of electing opposing partisans rather than electing nonpartisans seems more plausible -- and certainly more Madisonian.

We achieve these split branch situations quite regularly, however, and they often result not in compromise but in gridlock. The last two years has seen a Democratic congress and a Republican presidency and progress has been negligible. Prior to that, the GOP controlled both of these branches intermittently since 1994 and progress was certainly not negligible, though perhaps movement would be a more apt term to describe these events. This era resulted in Grover Norquist's famous quip that "bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

Politics is the art of the possible and achieving that possibility often requires compromise. If this is what we mean by bipartisanship then its partisans are on strong footing. But if bipartisans really mean that the answer to political problems is always found in the center then they are surely wrong. We should be moderates as we deliberate over issues but that does not mean we should always end our deliberation with an ultimately moderate position. The median position held by voters is not necessarily the correct one.

Yes, this is a partisan response and committed bipartisans may reject it outright on account of this, but it seems that a doctrinaire bipartisan response to years of partisanship is similar to failing to press charges after date rape. Bipartisans are on to something when they urge co-operation and collaboration; they are missing something when they suggest the political center is the natural home of political truth. Split tickets are a great idea, but let's split our tickets over elections, not over candidates -- the corrective to a Republican era is not a bipartisan one, but a Democratic one.

The editorial board is composed of David Grant, Laurel Colella, David McIlroy, Sally Bull and Jackie Peters