In 1994, congressional Republicans carried laminated copies of their Contract With America (tax cuts, term limits, etc.) in their pockets. They may now want to laminate President Obama's inaugural address and carry it around.

This is not as silly as it sounds. Republican leaders believe the speech pleased them more than it did House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Obama's "new era of responsibility" echoed the "Personal Responsibility Act," the third of the ten planks in the Contract With America. Obama also said that it's not the size of government which matters but whether it works. Newt Gingrich coined that thought years ago. Obama lauded "risk-takers." Democrats want to tax them to death.

For the foreseeable future, attacking Obama will be counterproductive for Republicans. He's both enormously popular and the bearer of moral authority as the first African-American president. So the idea is for Republicans to make Obama an ally by using his words, from the inaugural address and speeches and interviews, against Democrats and their initiatives in Congress.

Obama is for bipartisanship. Pelosi, Reid, and their cohort are heavyhanded partisans with no interest in accommodating Republicans. Obama favors transparency. They don't. Obama says he wants "to spend wisely" and promises that "programs will end" if they don't work. That's hardly the philosophy of congressional Democrats.

Obama's words may be bromides or boilerplate that bear little relationship to his true sentiments or real plans. But so what? Republicans in the House and Senate are a badly outnumbered minority. They have few

It might even get Republicans some attention. For the mainstream media, Obama is the only story in Washington. Most reporters are indifferent to the excesses of one-party, Democratic rule on Capitol Hill. But the argument that Democrats are out of sync with Obama, if repeated often enough, might get some traction.

Republicans are already using it against the $850 billion economic stimulus package drafted by congressional Democrats and tentatively accepted at the White House as Obama's program. Republicans complained they'd been shut out. Indeed they had been, their input ignored. Obama listened to Republican leaders at a bipartisan meeting at the White House last week and scheduled a session this week with House Republican whip Eric Cantor.

Republicans exploited two other weapons at their disposal. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell got a copy of the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Democratic bill. It wasn't a formal CBO report, wasn't set for public release, and never appeared on the office's website. But McConnell leaked it to the Associated Press, whose story appeared a few hours before Obama was inaugurated. The AP story began, "It will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Obama will boost the economy, according to congressional economists."

The $274 billion for infrastructure had been billed as the job-creating, economy-stimulating part of the bill. But only 7 percent of the money would be spent in 2009 and less than $4 billion in highway construction funds would hit the economy before September 2010.