As negotiations continue over President Obama's proposed jobs bill, CNN reported yesterday that House Minority Leader Eric Cantor “continued to reach out to work with President Obama” on the legislation, while the Associated Press quoted Speaker of the House John Boehner's spokesman lamenting that the president's job bill wasn't being offered in a “bipartisan spirit.”

Collectively, the CNN and AP reports leave the impression that Republicans want very much to work with the White House, but are disappointed the administration isn't being more “bipartisan.”

This, of course, is nuts. In fact, it represents the exact opposite of what's been taking place for the last two years as Republicans have embraced their militant strategy of uniformly opposing nearly every key initiative put forward by the White House.

As Media Matters has noted for some time, much of the Beltway press corps refuses to put today's Republican obstructionism in any kind of historical context. Pundits and reporters watch the GOP universally reject White House initiatives with party-line votes and the press pretends it's normal. The press pretends that's how the game has always been played; that presidents have always found it virtually impossible to secure votes from the opposition party.

Not true. The Beltway game has never been played the way it's unfolded under Obama. That's not how the game was played under George W. Bush. And, for instance, that's not how the game was played under Ronald Reagan. And specifically, not in 1983.

The comparison with Reagan in `83 is especially helpful because, like Obama, Reagan was in the third year of his presidency, his approval rating was in the 40s, his party had suffered midterm election losses the year prior, the U.S. economy was faltering, and the opposition controlled the House of Representatives.

Those are the similarities. The difference? Reagan's political opposition had not embraced the radical notion of complete and utter obstructionism.

This dispatch from the New York Times, August 9, 1983, details how Congress actually worked [emphasis added]:

Congress has gone on vacation after one of its most productive periods in recent history, and to this point, the 98th session of the nation's legislature could well be called ''the bipartisan consensus Congress.''

In a half-dozen major areas, from job legislation to the MX missile to Social Security, the lawmakers were able to succeed by seeking accommodations across party lines. They were also able to establish a decent, if occasionally rocky, relationship with the White House. So far this year, President Reagan has signed more than 60 bills and not used his veto once on a major issue.

The spirit of uneasy detente that has pervaded the Capitol was explained this way by Senator David Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat: ''The fact of life is, we're politicians, and we work within the parameters of what is achievable.''

The radical nature of what we're witnessing today has no precedent in modern American politics. It's just that the press seems reluctant to say so.