EDITORIAL:

In Washington, of all places, the buzz word Friday was “bipartisanship.”

What got the Bickersons in the mood to step outside the spin cycle for a moment and get to work for once? A genuine emergency, as the economy chokes and gags with all the efficiency of a 1975 AMC Pacer. They know the economy needs CPR — and soon.

In the presidential race, many top-tier candidates have gotten a lot of mileage out of calls for “change” and bipartisanship. GOP hopeful John McCain has long been a maverick who reaches across the aisle to get things done. Sen. Barack Obama is earning a similar reputation.

But the bipartisan bug hasn’t caught on in Costa Mesa yet. The council makes Newt vs. Bill look like patty-cake.

Yet again, last week the council shot down a Katrina Foley-led proposal by a 3-2 vote. This time it was a multipurpose trail in a flood channel.

We were on record supporting the trail, so it’s not worth rehashing that argument. It’s enough to say that some neighbors disputed it because they feared it would generate crime and intrude on their privacy. Most of the council members said they favored the proposal, but the majority changed their minds when some neighbors said they didn’t want it. Fair enough.

But Foley revived the issue again, arguing the council didn’t hear from all of the supporters.

We don’t blame the majority council members for getting annoyed. They had rejected just weeks ago, and they were being asked to reconsider largely the same thing.

But the level of civil discussion in general has continued to devolve. When the mayor rips a cost project from his staff of about $1 million and then does his own math and comes up with a $25 million estimate, it brings to mind the expression he “doth protest too much.” It would have been enough to say the project had not changed so his neither had his opinion — time to move on. But to keep arguing after the project has been dunked is just piling on.

We worry that some ideas proposed by council members will run into interference just because they were proposed by one side or another. It’s important to keep an open mind and judge any proposal on its merits. And please do your best to keep the conversation civil.

The council has the community’s best interests at heart; they wouldn’t be on the dais otherwise. The council’s business is not a football game. If it degenerates into a competition there will be no winners — and the real losers will be all of us.