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David Brooks calls for GOP split

In case you missed it in Playbook this morning, New York Times columnist David Brooks is calling for a split in the GOP.

"It's probably futile to try to change current Republicans," he writes in today's paper. "It's smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It's smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton."

(Also on POLITICO: For GOP, 2 is better than 1)

"The second G.O.P. ... would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama's second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don't share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P," he continues. "Would a coastal and Midwestern G.O.P. sit easily with the Southern and Western one? No, but majority parties are usually coalitions of the incompatible. This is really the only chance Republicans have."

Brooks is right about the intra-party divisions, though I'm not convinced they fall on geographic lines. (Neither is Brooks; he opens his column praising Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana for "calling on Republicans to stop being the stupid party, to stop insulting the intelligence of the American people.")

I'm even more skeptical about this "coalition of the incompatible." That's what the Republican party is now. If it worked, the factions wouldn't need to split.