As the minority party, that is their prerogative, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of policies that are vastly increasing the debt (it would help even more to have alternative budgets that don’t invite mockery!), but if a party has opted to go down the rejectionist route it is silly to complain the President is having a polarizing effect as if this were a bad outcome.
Yes, but the Republicans are running McCain-Palin 2.0. They're not even copying the good parts, either: evidently they think that the McCain strategy of message whack-a-mole, in which you change your message on an almost daily basis, from one silly argument to another in hopes that something sticks, not unlike trying to hit whatever mole pops up in the legendary arcade game. If you hit, then you go with it so long as the media is interested, e.g. "Drill, baby, drill!" and when the media stops caring you just pick something else and repeat. I actually thought that the message operation was the weakest part of the McCain campaign, no doubt due to McCain's own inability to set priorities and plot strategy and just to say whever pops into his mind, rather than crafting a sustained argument for your candidacy, as President Obama did.
So far as I can tell, the McCain-Palin press operation was sort of like Rovism with ADD. There were an endless stream of incendiary, divisive declarations that hit all the classic conservative sweet spots, except that they switched them up too quickly for any to take hold and were quickly forgotten. It really was a campaign geared toward winning every newscycle and getting Mark Halperin's verdict on who won the week to go their way. And it's not like these tactics weren't successful in and of themselves. But, as the Vietnamese general says, that might be true but it is also irrelevant. So we have the Tea Parties and "Obama's Polarizing", this month's rightist flavor that will be forgotten in June. By then, it will be something new, though likely something having to do with ACORN...
