Barack Obama's fundraising asks lately boast of his having to wage a campaign on two fronts, one against Hillary Clinton and one against John McCain and, to that second end, as Senators Obama and Clinton return to Washington for a senate budget debate today, Barack Obama is taking some shots at John McCain, this time for flip-flopping on tax cuts.

Criticizing GOP efforts to extend major tax cuts from Bush's first term and to eliminate the estate tax, Obama said: "These are all steps that John McCain rightly said were irresponsible when they first came up."

"He made a decision to reverse himself on that," Obama told reporters as he flew from Chicago to Washington for a series of Senate votes on budget issues.

"That was how, I guess, you got your ticket punched to be the Republican nominee," he said of McCain. "But he was right then, and he's wrong now."

It's an attack he's used in debates and is effective I think both because of how it's delivered ("he was right the first time...") and also because it goes to McCain's perceived strength, his authenticity and his independence from the Republican party line.  

The McCain response was predictable:

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a statement that if Obama is nominated, "the American people will have a clear choice: John McCain will cut taxes while Senator Obama will raise them, hurting our economy and costing jobs for hardworking Americans."

And now Republicans in the senate are using the budget debate to take a jab at Obama by painting him as a big-spending liberal:

While senators gravely speak about the nation's fiscal health all day during the Senate budget debate, they're not above making purely political points aimed at embarrassing one another.

To wit: Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado, has crafted a massive budget amendment that claims to fund every policy proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on the presidential campaign trail. Allard's amendment _ doomed to fail by a significant margin _ includes $1.4 trillion in spending over five years by proposing Obama's universal health care program ($65 billion a year), expanding the Army ($6.6 billion a year) and eliminating income taxes on lower income seniors ($10 billion a year).

Pretty scary stuff. The irony is, of course, that if the senate were to actually pass this amendment congress's approval rating would probably go through the roof. It's laughable to me that the GOP still thinks that in 2008, when we're in the midst of a systematic electoral purge of the party of tax cuts and government de-funding from Washington, that they're still going to the big spending liberal well. If they really want to go there, I like Senator Obama, welcome it.