This takes the cake:

Beginning Sunday, the White House will harness every part of the Democratic Party’s machinery to defend President Obama’s budget and portray Republicans as reflexively political, according to party strategists.

A participant in the planning meetings described the push as a successor to Democrats’ message that Rush Limbaugh is the Republican Party leader. “We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter,” the official said.

The team that spent weeks cooking up a scheme to tie the opposition to a talk show host, shut Republicans out of the stimulus drafting process, tries to put Rahm Emanuel in charge of the Census, and sneers at President Bush at every turn is going to cast the other guys as hopelessly political. Step One: Try to keep it under your hat that you have a political plot to paint the opposing party as too political.

Really, do these people not have anything to do other than cook up one political campaign-type stunt after another? Well, that is what they do best, certainly better than constructing an economic recovery plan or convincing Red state senators that they are serious about fiscal discipline. And as we — and they — have discovered, campaigning is a heck of a lot easier than governing.