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Photo: Randy Son Of Robert

President Obama’s noble determination to forge a new spirit of bipartisanship in Washington — not just in rhetoric but in deed — should provide great comfort to every American who has recoiled for almost two decades at the juvenile us-vs.-them divisiveness ripping the seams of our national fabric.

A disjointed collection of red and blue states we are not, Obama reminds us. We are, now as always, one. A people with common ideals that bind us together — just as they did on that day 233 years ago when by stroke of pen America’s founders announced our birth as a sovereign nation, and that day 11 years later when they adopted our Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

Yet, as Marie Cocco of the Washington Post Writers Group reminds us in her insightful column yesterday, let’s not forget the disastrous path that Republican ideology has led us down these past 15 years — first via legislative control and then also by executive power.

Given that, as Ms. Cocco suggests, Obama will need to recognize the difference between inviting political opponents to work productively together with him on identifying solutions for national problems and, on the other hand, caving in to more of the very same failed ideology that has driven us to this horrendous state of affairs.

No, neither party has a monopoly on good ideas, as Obama pointedly has said. But in helping to originate workable new solutions, it’s time now for Republicans to expand their minds beyond the narrow range of possible options they have pursued in the past. It’s think outside the box time.

Bipartisanship actually has three meanings. It can signify getting your way some of the time and allowing the other side to do the same at other times. More often it means finding a middle ground — a compromise that will partially satisfy both sides, yet one with which both can live. But in its purest form, bipartisanship means abandoning party ideology and special-interest considerations in order to creatively arrive at the very best possible solution that protects the most important special interest of all — the American people as a whole.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should seriously reconsider her attitude toward the matter, if her remarks this week about GOP grumblings over being shut out of the stimulus package drafting are any indication. “”Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” she said.

Let’s hope that both Republicans as well as Democrats recognize the 2006 and 2008 elections for what they were: a nation crying out for unity, as much as a different direction.