Yet another Republican has fallen into the trap of discussing whether or not Rush Limbaugh is the head of the Republican party.

This is a fun little game, apparently concocted in daily conference calls between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Democratic operatives James Carville and Paul Begala, and ABC News’ George Stephanopolous. It involves finding some Republican and buttonholing him on whether or not Rush Limbaugh is the head of the GOP, as the fur flies over the answer.

It’s a clever move: Right now the Republican party doesn’t have a clear leader. Michael Steele is the party chairman and John McCain was the party’s most recent nominee for president, but neither has a solid lock on the position of “leader.” There’s a strong case to be made that the GOP doesn’t have any veritable “leader” at the moment.

This shouldn’t be an urgent problem for them. The next election isn’t scheduled until a year and a half from now. The party can take a little time to step back, regroup, and rethink matters a bit.

Yet like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. With no prominent Republican to step forward and assume the leadership role, these leading Democrats (using the resources of their party — the White House, and ABC News) are pushing a scheme to turn Rush Limbaugh into the “face” of the GOP. So far they have been successful at stirring up fights between those Republican politicians they’ve managed to entangle in this debate.

By affirming that Limbaugh is their leader, Republicans would be slighting Steele. If they deny Limbaugh as their leader, they would be alienating his millions of fans. If in the course of their renunciation of Limbaugh’s leadership they get baited into making any less-than-flattering statement about him (no matter how trivial), they can be goaded into backpedaling and apologizing — an implicit acknowledgment of Limbaugh’s supremacy.

Limbaugh himself is largely ignoring this stunt. He’s more adept at countering direct attacks — such as when Media Matters conned every single Democrat in the Senate into signing a condemning letter to Limbaugh’s syndicator — he took that letter and spun it into a multimillion-dollar auction (matched by his own funds) for a charity, garnered a ton of good publicity for himself, and put the Democratic signatories on the defensive.

Rush Limbaugh is not the leader of the Republican Party. Michael Steele is its chairman, but the GOP is still working out precisely who its strategic leader will be, going forward.