Election season in the US never really stops, does it? No sooner had Nov. 4 passed and the 2010 election talk started. This past week all eyes were on CPAC and straw polls looking even further ahead to 2012, with Mitt Romney rising to the fore as GOP presidential frontrunner. But what is really remarkable (and maybe only to me) is how the slow and steady drumbeat from the Obama White House has already begun to shape and frame the issue of whom is leading the now emasculated and greatly diminished GOP.

This is politics being played brilliantly. Watching Obama and his staff maneuver this past week reminds me of what it's like to have the smart people in charge once again. This is not Bill Clinton or George W. Bush floundering to get a cabinet in place in the first six months of their administrations. Despite a few hiccups with nominee withdrawls, Obama is already miles ahead of where his predecessors were at this point in January of 1993 or 2001.

Obama has in his first six weeks passed landmark legislation on a scale unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes; the "recovery.gov" signs are ready to go up on the first projects funded, and the news reports are already listing the numbers of people being put back to work. How's that for fast change?

But getting back to my main point, I'm loving the way the current crisis is being dealt with. I am particularly loving the way that Obama is working to either win over his critics, or failing that, to render them impotent. There is obviously a concerted effort from the White House to bring transparency back to all branches of the US government: the DOJ is releasing documents revealing the presidential dictatorship that Bush and crew had engineered over the past seven years, the Obama budget includes the actual cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and doesn't hide it in supplemental bills, the ban on photographing the coffins of the returning war dead has been lifted, and on it goes.

Along with shining a light on the governmental process, we can see, too, that Obama is bring the disinfecting quality of sunshine back to the political process as well. No longer is he allowing the puppet masters to hide in the shadows. You have some criticism to offer? Stand up in front of the public and say it. You're against putting people back to work, giving the middle class a tax break, letting the wealthiest of Americans (who benefited most from the manipulation of the stock and real estate markets) go back to paying their fair share? Stand up and be counted.

And those of you who like to hide in the background, fomenting hate and bigotry, racism and prejudice, calling for obstruction and even violence? If you think you are the guiding conscience of that segment of the population, well, so do we. You are that leader. Stop hiding. Stand up in your Tony Soprano mafioso black silk shirt, and take a bow. We are happy to let you be the figurehead of the sinking ship named "Intolerance."

This is one of the many things I admire about Obama. If there is one person above all others that all Republicans fear to cross, than that person is obviously their leader. The GOP has functioned for so long on the premise that the "leader" is primarily a spokesperson who stands at the podium and reads the current propoganda from a teleprompter, always maintaining plausible deniability, never taking responsibility for anything, the buck never stopping.

Those days are over. Obama is pulling back the cover, and there's nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide. You're either part of the process of helping to fix the mess we're in, or you're with the obstructionists who now can say nothing but "no". The GOP has become the party of nothing: nothing to offer, no plan to get us out of the mess that their deregulating, tax-cutting mantra of the past 28 years has created. The party that couldn't lead, and is now unable to follow.

In one of Bob Dylan's early songs, called "Talking New York", he sang:

Lot of people don't have too much food on their tables,
But they got a lotta forks, lotta knives,
And they gotta cut somethin' -- watch out.

That line has been coming back to me a lot these past few months. The GOP doesn't have as much power as they have been accustomed to, thanks to all of the efforts we made to pry their hands from the levers of government, but they still have theirs long knives. Obama knows it, and we should take heed to remind ourselves, they gotta cut somethin' -- watch out.

Better that we can keep them cutting each other.