Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are quite a duo. If the Republicans wanted to invent characters as political foils they’d be hard pressed to come up with better ones.

Pelosi is a font of information — 90% of it wrong. 500 million jobs a month? Well, the boost in contraceptive funding she’s hawking will take care of that. She often has that deer-in-the-headlights appearance. Recall her run-in last summer on offshore drilling? Not a pretty sight.

Then there is Reid.  Roland Burris isn’t getting into the Senate. Oh, well . . . yes he is. Who cares about the moderate senators? Not Reid! Oh,  never mind –let’s negotiate with them all night. No, no we’re going home. For the sake of his fellow Senators (Democrats included) I hope they all have GPS handsets to follow Reid as he criss-crosses the legislative landscape. And when we get around to taxes, he’ll remind us they aren’t mandatory (even for non-cabinet appointees).

Are these two honestly the best Democrats can do? I suppose they were both adequate when it came to throwing spit balls at the Bush administration. But now they have to pass legislation that is acceptable to 60 senators, a majority of the congressmen, and a broad cross-section of Americans. They can’t make the neophyte president seem like a neophyte president. And they have to avoid appearing extreme, intransigent, and loutish. How are they doing? Not so well.

Both have helped unify the Republicans like nothing in a decade. And both have done more to sink the stimulus bill than anything the Republicans could have come up with on their own. For now at least, for Republicans, what’s not to like?