bipartisanship, to me at least, means one or the other......there is nothing else. which is what is wrong with our country. Lincoln was the last third party candidate to ever get elected into the white house. why? because the big two now have too much power and everyone votes for the lesser of two evils, instead of the right person for the job.
Lincoln was not a third party candidate. By the time he was elected, the Republican Party was one of the two major parties.
The rise of the Republican Party exemplifies how our Republic will always be a two-party system. When one of the two parties evaporates, it will be replaced with a new second party. No third party will ever succeed unless it replaces one of the two major parties.
I like the-two party system. More than at any other time in my life (and likely more than at any time in history), the two parties are moving ideologically away from each other, providing a real choice. (Yeah, I know. Someone is now going to chime in with the "two sides of the same coin" BS. That thinking gave us the current leadership. And, anyone who does not think that the current leadership is far worse and more dangerous to Liberty than the previous leadership just isn't watching the goings on!)
I attribute the stability of our political system to the two-party system. Rather than dozens of little parties all pulling in different directions, such squabbles occur within the parties, and allow us to put up more clear choices in general elections--not always, but most of the time.
The two-party system was not mandated, but naturally evolved as the logical way voters express their will. While it guarantees that no candidate will ever represent any voter perfectly, the system produces candidates that adequately represent large blocks of people.
Like I said, I like that a two-party system has evolved.