Steve Benen has a good item about how the new conservative/principled centrist line about the deficit is that it doesn’t matter who caused it, let’s not play the blame game etc…except that from now on we should blame Obama.
One of the big things I’ve never gotten about politics is why it matters who you’d like to have a beer with. No one chooses their surgeon on the basis of whether or not they’d like to have a beer with him, why would they do it with prospective leaders of the free world?
The other thing I don’t get is why people are so weird about assigning blame in politics. It seems to me that in most successful enterprises, some effort is made to keep track of who has screwed things up and who has generally succeeded. Not to get too Bayesian about this, but it’s not unreasonable to think that the best way to predict people’s future job performance is to analyze their past job performance.
Why doesn’t politics work that way? Why would anyone want to put Republicans in charge of the federal budget again after the Bush (and Reagan, to be honest) budget fiascos?