The key problem for our new president is likely not to be Republicans, but will probably be the Democratic Party’s Left Wing.

Pres. Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review and was an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.  He can’t have missed the influence of the Chicago School in Economics or of the law and economics movement.  He knows liberal nostrums don’t work, as anyone of his generation does.

Indeed, his health care reform proposals and those of the House Republicans are not incompatible.  However, any thought about, for example, making legal regulation of the practice of medicine or business of insurance more uniform among the several states, thereby reducing barriers to entry and reducing administrative costs, is likely to be drown out by a chorus of individuals in tie-dyed garments yelling, “Single payor, single payor.”  Simply put, our new President is too beholden to his own left wing to bring about market-based healthcare reform that might give cheaper and more universal coverage or to cut taxes and government spending in such a way as to bring about an economic recovery.

“It’s deja vu all over again,” as Yogi Berra said: a Democrat President, failing to implement health care reform and crippling his own left wing in Congress passing a stimulus package.  As Marx said, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

As things worsen, as they are likely to, many people will start to consider alternatives in 2010.  Like Clinton, losing his left wing in Congress might help Pres. Obama win a second term.  He could implement workable policies with a Republican Congress and pass the blame with his constituencies off on the Republicans, a process you may remember as “triangulation.”

The trick to making sure people know they have a choice requires Republicans to let people know what their alternatives are.  We have to propose market-based solutions and make people understand the advantage they will enjoy in an environment of lower taxes, smaller government and decreased regulation.

To that end the new media, Fox, Talk Radio and the internet, have to be leveraged.  Moreover, the campaign to recapture the House and Senate must begin now.  When people begin to realize in the Summer of this year that “No, he can’t,” they must know that they can by electing conservatives to represent them in 2010.

It is incumebent on the leaders of the conservative movement to begin planning now.