It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.
And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.
I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.
It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.
Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.
