Continetti faults the president for increased partisanship:
Obama has missed opportunities to seize the ground of national unity and possibly split the GOP. He could have for example included defense funding in the stimulus bill, or decided to go back to the drawing board on health care after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, or embraced fully the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s recommendations in January 2011. He did none of these things. What we got instead was a mobilization of the center-left coalition toward partisan ends that had been on the agenda for years and in some cases decades. What we got was an unshackled and unhinged country whose people are at each other’s throats.
Was one-third of the stimulus as tax cuts GOP-hostile? Was a healthcare plan based on their own nominee's exact past policy confrontational? Or a climate policy also based on a conservative principle – cap and trade? How polarizing was Obama's vast expansion of natural gas exploration? Or withdrawing from Iraq and decimating al Qaeda? Or keeping Bush's tax cuts extended for the vast majority?
What the current movement right fails to get (but the left understands all too well) is that Obama is a moderate Republican president, and the polarization of the past three years has been a function almost entirely of the GOP's decision from 2008 on to oppose, obstruct and destroy a presidency that represented – and still represents – a massive rebuke to their extremism and failure this past decade.
They have responded by becoming an ultra-rightist, populist, revolutionary party, rather than a conservative one. Whatever its roots, it's the reason we are so far apart. Obama's moderate, pragmatic presidency isn't.
The Dish 