Obama attempts to split Republicans

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Some very interesting news reported yesterday.

During a conference on the bailout, Obama is said to have told the Republican conferees who objected to some points of his economic plan 'I won,' implying of course that they didn't. President Bush said something quite similar about spending political capital after his 2004 re-election. The press pilloried Bush, but has given Obama a free ride. Nothing new there, but worth pointing out -- as we know that at least MSNBC's political reporter Chris Matthews thinks the free press must do everything it can to make Obama successful.

The second point was that Obama told Republicans that if they thought they wanted to get anything into his economic recovery plan, they needed to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. This too is getting plenty of press coverage.

Both of these points make a great deal of sense, and conform to the Republican malaise - the split between conservatives and Republican liberals like McCain.

Obama is merely doing what Democrats do -- he is trying to lead the consolidation of power not by cooperating with the opposition as far as possible, but trying to hasten its demise.

At the end of the month of January, Republicans will elect an RNC leader. They will demonstrate with their choice whether they wish to be conservatives, or what one pundit has called 'Democrats-lite." McCain is already signaling he will go along with some number of Obama policies.

Unfortunately, my view is that George Bush himself brought this split along in two areas: refusing to fund the War on Terror with even a symbolic tax surcharge, and ultimately (and more significantly) generating huge deficits by allowing the Treasury to print unbacked dollars to 'rescue' some companies, AIG - BAC - Citi - GM to name a few, and not rescue others, Bear-Stearns being the big name there.

If the Republicans choose to position themselves as Democrats-lite, it will leave many of us small government conservatives looking for a new home -- much as we did in 1992 with none other than George Herbert Walker Bush. Sometimes symmetry is striking, isn't it?

We await the end of January.