Buy this photo Bill Cotterell

There's an old adage — variously attributed to Confucius, Lincoln or Pogo — that goes something like, "Choose your enemies carefully, because that's whom you'll become."

The Republican Party of Florida didn't exactly choose the Democrats for foes, but there are signs that the GOP is becoming more like them. Not in political philosophy — the Democrats still hate all the right things — but after a dozen years in power, the GOP is beginning to emulate how they play the game.

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For most of the past four decades, the Republicans have been almost monolithic. They believe in Connie Mack's three values of lower taxes, less government and more freedom. Going to a Republican meeting still pretty much means listening to people agreeing with each other.

The Democrats also agree with each other on the big stuff, but they have always been a fractious bunch. They can argue for an hour over matters that (a) don't matter and (b) pass or fail unanimously. A silly questioner might ask, "Well, if you all agree, why did you debate all that time?"

Until the Jeb Bush era, about 15 years ago, Republicans won statewide races only when Democrats helped out by slashing each other's Achilles' tendons. Claude Kirk, an outsider businessman somewhat like Rick Scott, became governor partly because the Democrats dumped Gov. Haydon Burns in a bitter primary and then couldn't unite behind Miamian Robert King High.

They did it again two years later, and Sen. Ed Gurney became the first Republican U.S. senator of modern times. Back when the Public Service Commission was elected statewide, a divisive 1972 Democratic primary resulted in the late Paula Hawkins winning a seat — and she won a Senate seat in 1980 mainly because Sen. Dick Stone lost the nomination to Bill Gunter, who couldn't patch things up with Democrats in the face of the Reagan onslaught.

Attorney General Jim Smith, then a Democrat, and state Rep. Steve Pajcic did it again in 1986, and Republican Bob Martinez became governor. In the very next cycle, Gunter and Buddy MacKay so split the Democrats that Mack won by an eyelash (although, as with Reagan in 1980, the state party was probably hurt by the Dukakis debacle).

These days, Florida Republicans can win without murder-suicide Democratic primaries, but they're learning to fracture themselves. Attorney General Bill McCollum said down in St. Petersburg the other day that he isn't sure if he can endorse Rick Scott, if Scott wins the GOP primary for governor on Aug. 24.

Logically, McCollum has good grounds for his reluctance. He has basically called Scott a crook, citing the $1.7 billion in penalties and fines paid by Columbia/HCA for Medicare fraud while Scott was the companies top executive. McCollum, labeled a "career politician" by Scott, has also said the newcomer lacks the experience necessary to run a government.

All of this is hard to take back the morning after the primary, if Scott wins the nomination. In 1994, McCollum took a while before finally endorsing ex-Sen. Mel Martinez after their primary, partly because Martinez supporters unfairly smeared him in a negative ad campaign.

Republicans don't normally show dissent. The last time they had a close contest for governor, in 1994, Bush almost won without a runoff, but Smith, who by then was a Republican secretary of state, just barely kept his campaign alive. But he looked at the gap in the polls, made a no-nonsense evaluation of his chances, and conceded the nomination to Bush.

Locally, there was a flap this week among the FSU College Republicans. They retracted a McCollum endorsement made last October, when the attorney general was the lone credible candidate for the Republican nomination. They didn't endorse Scott, just went neutral.

What was more interesting was a faction that sought to impeach the club president. About 30 collegiate Republicans met Tuesday night for a discussion that was orderly, respectful and intelligent (they're not completely like the Democrats yet), and it wound up with a suggestion of ousting the four members who'd tried to topple the club president.

That fizzled, but there was much back-and-forth about the validity of having the meeting at all, or whether proper notice had been given in a 1:09 a.m. e-mail calling an earlier executive board meeting, which had moved to impeach the president. It's not important in the grand scheme of things, except to some very committed young voters who care about their club and their candidates, but it illustrates how starkly split the rift is, between McCollum's mainstream (you'd hardly call them moderates) and Scott's Tea Party-to-libertarian brand of Republicanism.

Nationally, the GOP has had this kind of branding, back to Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. For Florida, rancor in Republican ranks is something new — in a political season already enlivened by such novelties as no-incumbent races for all five top offices and a slew of hot constitutional amendments.

Notwithstanding the contretemps between U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek and Jeff Greene in the U.S. Senate race, the Democrats look placid this year.

CFO Alex Sink has a primary for governor, but the party is united behind her. Scott Maddox and Loranne Ausley are already nominees for, respectively, agriculture commissioner and CFO, and the only real primary race is between state Sens. Dan Gelber and David Aronberg for attorney general.

That one is a little rough, but you can't have a primary without conflict. But the Aronberg-Gelber race has nowhere near the anger factor of, say, the Scott-McCollum contest or the fury jilted GOP loyalists feel toward Gov. Charlie Crist in his independent U.S. Senate race.