Yet another Beltway pundit who pretends Fox News is not the de facto Opposition Party; who pretends it's really professional GOP politicians who are driving the anti-Obama train, not the GOP Noise Machine. As I noted recently, when the New York Times did the same thing, it's really a rather quaint and outdated way to view to politics today.

From Ambinder's piece at cbsnews.com, dissecting the GOP's (unprecedented) strategy to oppose everything Obama initiates [emphasis added]:

Republicans have a much better sense of the morphology of public opinion and much better tools to exploit it.

...

Part two of the strategy is hoary and brazen at the same time: portray everything Mr. Obama does as being the avatar of European socialism. This discredits the very idea that government ought to do anything at all. And people tend to believe it, according to public opinion surveys, because they blame government for the underlying economic malaise.

...

Republicans have created a feedback loop: every Obama accomplishment is shunted to the “Socialism” box, and every Obama failure is designated as a sign that Democrats can't govern.

Really? Republicans are condemning Obama as a socialist? Republicans have created a feedback loop that relentlessly attack the president? They have better “tools” to “exploit” public opinion?

But what are those tools? Ambinder doesn't say. But of course, it's Fox News, the Opposition Party, that's done the attacking over the last year. But Beltway pundits steadfastly resist acknowledging how a 'news' org acts as a propaganda arm for a political party.

UPDATED: Favorite line from the Ambinder piece:

[Obama] failed, having made mistakes, but having also fallen victim to a partisan stratification he did not fully anticipate and to the threat of a depression and the complete collapse of the American economic system.

Obama didn't fully anticipate that the party out of power would collectively oppose every major WH initiative. Ambinder doesn't say so, but maybe Obama didn't full anticipate that because it's never happened before in modern day American politics.

Just a thought.