There are two kinds of people in this world.  Builders and Breakers.  

Building is hard work.  Building consensus, building sound economic policy, building a movement for positive change.  It's hard.  It takes a long time.  It's much easier to just break stuff.  And Republicans, they like to do things the easy way.  Every time.

When John McCain publishes outrageous lies about Obama, trying to scare people, just remember - he's just doing what he does best.   Breaking stuff, scaring people.

Republicans govern the same way they run their presidential campaigns.  It's easy to break your opponent by 'going negative'.  It's easy to spread innuendo and lies and character assassination.  It's easy to call your opponent a flip-flopper, a traitor, a Muslim, an empty suit, a neophyte, too popular, too skinny, too Black, too young, too fill-in-the-blank.  With the help of a sensationalist national media it's ridiculously easy to run the campaign straight into the gutter.

But breaking things isn't such a great approach when they finally get their hands on the levers of power.