Up Against "History"

WASHINGTON -- It seems the good folks running the Capital Hilton might have considered rotating the merchandise in the hotel's lobby store. As members of the Republican National Committee gather here this week to elect a party chairman, a black t-shirt hangs out front. It is adorned with a picture of Barack Obama, arms folded across his chest, and the word "History" printed in big, bold letters.

It is a reminder to the 168 people charged with selecting the GOP's leadership that the challenge ahead is huge. They're not just tasked with resuscitating a party without message or messenger, without the White House or Congress under its wing, they're up against history, for goodness sake. The first African American president. The purveyor of all things hope and change. THE man who sparked a movement. Obamanation.

Obama, indeed, looms large over this week's chairman election, a six-way scramble to lead the party out of the deep depths of its electoral despair. Theirs is a search not to find a figurehead who could take it to Obama, because sentiment here is that's not the most important job of the next RNC leader, but to tap the right man to revamp the party's operations, from fundraising to registration to technology outreach. Nuts and bolts stuff.

"Reboot the RNC," cries out the stickers worn by advocates for Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis.

Another Anuzis supporter, a young woman wandering the hotel, punctuates that call with a sign draped across the side of her purse: "Live blogging, twittering, vlogging for Saul."

Anuzis might be making a play to be the RNC's Technology Czar, but others are looking to be the GOP's Spokesman in Chief (see former Ohio Sec. of State Ken Blackwell and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele) and others still are making what could be dubbed the Grassroots Guru appeal (see South Carolina Party Chairman Katon Dawson and the incumbent RNC chairman Mike Duncan).

And many, of course, have ambitions beyond the chairmanship (see most of the above). Fitting then that the hotel's Presidential Ballroom will host tomorrow's voting.

So in as much as members of a political party can have an identity crisis en masse, there's one afoot here. One GOPer described the race simply: "Jump ball."

Should activism prevail over personality?

"Duncan or Steele?" a guy asked former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, now the chairman of the state GOP, as he wandered the room before today's luncheon.

"I'm not even talking," barked the sometimes irascible Sununu, White House chief of staff to the first President Bush.

Campaign minions wandered about peddling campaign paraphernalia. Dawson's red stickers scream, "Katon!" Steele's signs are blue and modeled on the ones he used in his unsuccessful 2006 U.S. Senate bid, only these read "Steele, RNC chairman" not "Steele Democrat."

While consensus is tough to find around who should lead the party, most agree that tomorrow's balloting will take more than one round and perhaps several.

"There are 500 commitments on the second ballot among 168 people," said GOP consultant and television fixture Phil Musser.

Steele, for his part, appeared to be enjoying himself. "The fun is just beginning," he said to supporters perched ouside the event.

Others chirped that this frenzy represents democracy at its finest. If also its most unpredictable. Though many moments of the lunch event, featuring Wall Street Journal columnist and author John Fund, could have been pre ordained.

Duncan, in introducing Fund, hammered ACORN, a fixture of GOP attacks during the 2008 campaign, for registering Mickey Mouse in Florida and the whole of the Dallas Cowboys. He said Fund is who Bill Moyers, the journalist and former Lyndon Johnson press secretary, thinks he is.

Fund, author of "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," resented the complement. A person could walk through Moyers deepest work and "not get your feet wet," he said.

Maybe a quick jaunt to the hotel gift shop would provide GOPers with inspiration, guidance in their tortured decision making. The other comment on that Obama t-shirt? A quote from the newly-elected POTUS:

"For that is the true genius of America, that America can change."

(JENNIFER SKALKA)