It's hard not to swing at a lob as juicy as the one the Nobel committee delivered on Friday, but Republican leaders with their eyes on the 2010 prize would do well to treat such tasty set-ups with unflappable cool.

A wry smile while saying, "Like all Americans, we hope the president soon achieves the things that the Nobel Peace Prize typically honors." That would have been subtle enough.

Conservative pundits can go further, reasonably pointing out to voters that the prize is tantamount to foreign meddling in American policy-making -- something Americans aren't likely to cotton to. After all, committee members, by their own admission, meant their selection of the just-inaugurated Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize as a negative comment on the prior administration and as an endorsement of Mr. Obama's nascent talk-centered diplomacy.

And, unrestrained as ever, conservative entertainers such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Steyn can have a field day mocking Mr. Obama's lack of accomplishment and European socialists' arrogance.

But any disrespect from GOP officials and politicians is likely to turn off the centrist voters that polls old and new say Republicans can reach -- and need to -- in 2010. They need to treat Mr. Obama as gingerly as America's humorists do.

Setting aside Republicans, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass attributes the lack of snarky Obama jokes in mainstream venues to all the "Hopium" pundits have been smoking since the president's candidacy began.

Obama boosterism explains a lot -- we don't snipe at those we adore -- but you can't discount the humor-squelching effect of constant accusations of racism. Democrats, including 2003 Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter, continue to loudly play the race card against anyone -- from Republican pol to town hall grandma -- who dares disagree with the White House agenda.

It's grossly unfair to dissenters of goodwill, but it's also embarrassingly condescending to Mr. Obama in particular and blacks in general, since every modern (white) president has been the subject of relentless, often searing humor and dissent. But so long as white Americans are sensitive to the false racist charge, that's the card the left will play. GOP leaders need a two-pronged approach: deplore it on principle, then outsmart it.

The best way to do so is to keep the focus strictly on the issues. Exit polling released just before New Year's Day and easily overlooked in the left's post-election euphoria showed that despite voters' support for Mr. Obama, they feared the possible results of Democratic Party hegemony.

Target Point Consulting's in-depth poll of 1,000 voters sought to determine why they voted the way they did. As reported by the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary, there was plenty of bad news for Republicans: Voters faulted them for the bad economy, the prolonged war in Iraq, a too-strident position on immigration, and bailouts for big corporations.

Asked what they "liked least about the Democrats," the most common responses volunteered by poll respondents were "taxes going up," "big government," "liberal," "raise spending" and even "socialism."

These results were gathered and released well before Mr. Obama's inauguration. Ten months later, Republicans can make a strong case that what voters said they disliked in a potential Democratic agenda threatens to come to pass.

That's an open door for the GOP, and judging from other recent polling, voters are opening it even wider. In an August poll conducted by the Washington Post, only 27 percent of likely voters in Virginia identified themselves as Democrats -- the lowest number in the survey's 20-year history. Just one year ago, going into the 2008 election, that number was at an all-time high of 36 percent.

In the same year, Republican self-identification in Virginia has rebounded from its September 2008 low of 28 percent to a current 34 percent -- just a couple of points off the GOP's all-time high in August 2001.

Even more promising for the GOP, unaffiliated "likely voters" shifted from leaning toward either party in equal proportions, to leaning toward the Republican side by a margin of almost 2-to-1.

What happened in one year that could account for such a dramatic shift? Well, just an historic and supposedly transformative election, in which the Democratic Party gained control of the White House, both chambers of Congress, and thus the nation's political agenda.

Given the pronounced reversal in voters' willingness to identify with the party he leads, it's safe to say that while Norwegians may like the president's agenda, many American voters do not. That's not a yuk-fest for Republicans, but it ought to occasion a modest smile.

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