Bucco, of course those kinds of criticisms were raised during the campaign. They were raised on both sides and in every campaign. Going back, Bush was too dumb; Kerry was a fake hero; McCain was too old and sick; both Palin and Biden were too dumb, and so on.

I'm not referring to the criticisms that were leveled by opponents. I'm talking about the platforms the candidates ran on. Bush was the compassionate conservative, the healer of partisan differences. Obama had a pretty high-minded platform of healthcare reform, improvement in education, even tax reductions. Then after election, both tilted towards the far edge of their respective ideologies. Initially at least, both may have been pushed in those directions by the partisan base of their parties, which controlled Congress. But both seeded their administration with ideologues on the far edge of their political beliefs. Some of the Bush appointees couldn't go along with the unexpected shift in ideology towards neoconservatism and quit. Colin Powell and John Snow were among them. We've yet to see whether there are some centrists in the Obama administration who might think governance is shifting too far to the left.

There's little to be gained by losing political opponents saying, "I told you so." Obama was elected by a majority of Americans, as was George Bush. He's our President for four years at least, as was every President who preceded him. Frankly, I'm disgusted by the bitter partisanship that seems to be preventing our country from coming together for a common good. As Ronald Reagan once told Teddy Kennedy,"If you can get the Democrats to vote for 70-80% of what I want, that's enough. I'll get the rest later." That political philosophy has morphed into a "100% or nothing" ideology. While the term was created somewhat more recently, the Democrats were the party of no when Bush was President; now the GOP has taken their place.

Is all this in the best interests of the country? I think not.