By: Nicholas Sohr

The sniping across the Potomac intensified Wednesday, with Maryland’s Democratic Party attacking the record of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

This comes in response to the Virginia GOP’s attack on Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Tuesday. Nice symmetry, no?

The inter-state kerfuffle centers on budgets and taxes and the records of O’Malley, who heads the Democratic Governors Association, and McDonnell, who heads the Republican Governors Association, on both of those topics. The two men were on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, their first joint television appearance while leading their partisan governor’s groups.

David Sloan, executive director of the Maryland Democrats, wrote Wednesday: “McDonnell’s illusionary ‘surplus’ is the result of deferred bills, dismantled programs important to the middle class, budgetary obfuscation and federal stimulus spending. Rather than investing in Virginia’s future, McDonnell has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from schools, colleges and universities, and cut funding by a third for EMTs, police officers and firefighters. No wonder Virginia has one of the worst track records on funding education and ranks 44th in job creation in 2011.”

That came after Virginia Republicans hit O’Malley using a blog post on the National Review Online.

“So of all those Virginia Democrats who might be considering a run for governor in 2013 – like Terry McAuliffe, Mark Warner and Ward Armstrong – we ask a simple question: Do you support the O’Malley model of governance, or the McDonnell model of governance?”