As party leaders prepare to gather later this week in Washington, D.C., tasked with the unenviable mission of reassembling the pieces of GOP, the six-way battle for RNC Chairman is significantly heating up.

The very dynamics of the race and current political climate lends itself to personal and even misleading attacks: Each candidate, vying to differentiate themselves in a fiercely Democratic environment, will invariably levy charges of ideological impurity to gain the upper-hand. Highlighting perceived vulnerabilities – media faux pas, ideological speeding tickets, charges of racism – is a staple of modern political dog fights, and this race is clearly no exception. Every campaign dabbles in the cloak-and-dagger world of opposition research, and those who don’t probably weren’t viable candidates in the first place.

Indicative of the present intensity, I offer this piece of graphic-heavy opposition on current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan:

Throughout his term, Duncan was viewed by party insiders and reporters alike as a low-key fundraising wunderkind whose Solomonic solution to seat half of the Michigan and Florida convention delegates resolved the primary frontloading crisis that embroiled the Democrats and Howard Dean late into the primary campaign.

With former President Bush’s blessing, Duncan relieved Ken Melhman of his duties as Chairman in January of 2007 in a power-sharing agreement with Senator Mel Martinez. Per Bush’s directive, Martinez served as the de facto “face” of the Party in Bush’s absence, leaving Duncan to handle fundraising, the implementation of strategy, and to mediate intra-party conflicts. After parting ways with Congressional leadership on a series of key issues, the unity leadership structure devised by Bush crumbled when Martinez resigned in October of 2007 – at which point Duncan assumed the role of chief spokesman, too.

Republican losses in 2006 were a result of a confluence of factors, none of which included Mike Duncan. If pointing a finger helps you sleep at night while the Democratic majority works to pass the $825 billion “stimulus” plan, point to former Chairman Ken Melhman.

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Throwing aside her journalistic integrity, former RNC Associate Press Secretary Moira Bagley took it upon herself to give lie to wholly unsubstantiated rumors by stoking the flames of post-election anti-Palin sentiments.

At Palin critic David Frum’s new digital hitching post, NewMajority.com, Bagley contends, via blind sourcing, that Governor Sarah Palin’s controversial campaign wardrobe remains “stuffed in trash bags at RNC headquarters,” despite the McCain campaign’s promise it would be donated to charity.

Palin, Republican John McCain’s Vice Presidential pick, resigned from the limelight and returned to Alaska over two months ago after losing to then-Senator Barack Obama in November’s hotly-contested Presidential election. Why now, when Palin is no longer seeking national office, is this a salient issue – or, for that matter, even true?

Bagley, a former RNC employee who failed to properly disclose her connections with the Committee, says it’s time for the RNC to “air its dirty laundry,” but one top-ranking Republican official says her story doesn’t carry water. “It’s a total fabrication,” he said, adding, “There is nothing true about this whatsoever.”

By way of clarification, David Frum writes:

This story is not a story about Gov. Palin. In this matter, the former vice-presidential nominee did exactly the right thing. She promised to return the wardrobe at the end of the campaign, and she did return the wardrobe.

The story is about a dysfunctional party apparatus. Because of their own inability to act, the RNC has left Gov. Palin looking like a promise-breaker – and left everyone who donated to the McCain-Palin campaign feeling like a fool.

[…]

The moral bears on the RNC, an organization whose leaders think that evasion is a solution. It’s time for new leadership at the RNC and at all the highest levels of our party organization.

“Not a story about Gov. Palin,” eh? Any story even tangentially-related to the Alaska governor is “about” Palin, at least in the eyes of the media, and Frum should understand this. Palin’s unwed, teen daughter is impregnated by her high school boyfriend: Palin’s social conservative bona fides are bunk, further rendering her an unfit mother and unfit elected official. Palin “mysteriously” gives birth to her 5th child, Trig Palin, who suffers from Down syndrome: Palin is now a hardened political operative after her first foray into the world of political cover-ups. The migratory pattern of birds have shifted in Alaska: Palin is using too much hairspray for her signature “bee hive” hair style.

No, Frum did not elect to run this story to highlight the party’s upper-echelon’s evasiveness, crippling ineptitude, or even poor decision making. This was, at its heart, a feeble, last attempt to spike Governor Palin’s soaring popularity with base supporters.

Once characterizing Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination as “irresponsible,” Frum now pledges to build a “conservatism that can win again” with his new website, vis-à-vis cleansing the Party of Sarah Palin and social conservatives. His cause for “reform” seems increasingly shallow as the days progress.

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Vowing to lead a conservative resurgence and political realignment like none before, landslide loser Ken Blackwell is among the top contenders vying for the Chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. For whatever reason – political celebrity or perhaps his near-perennial candidacy – Blackwell’s record has, by and large, remained unexamined. That ends now.

Before he wasted his entire media budget in his failed bid for Governor – resulting in an embarrassing 24 point loss – but after he supported Jimmy Carter for President in 1976, Ken Blackwell, a Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the socially conservative Family Research Council, held shares in Barr Pharmaceuticals, one of the largest American-based producers of the Plan B drug, or “Morning-After Pill,” designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The FRC, who promises to keep the Obama administration in check on matters related to abortion, maintains that the controversial drug presents a “clear and present danger” to women’s health, though this “grave threat” was evidently of little concern to Blackwell when building his multimillion dollar portfolio. In addition to his substantial holdings with Barr, Blackwell held shares of the Nevada-based International Game Technology Corporation (ITG). ITG is the leading producer of slot machines and coincidentally was an ardent advocate for their legalization in Ohio, a constitutional amendment Blackwell ostensibly opposed. How Blackwell, who opposes both abortion and the legal expansions of gambling, reconciles his conscience and pocketbook is a talent known only to life-long politicians. His confusing investments can only be explained as such: Blackwell is a poor manager, further evidenced by his latest campaign, or these raging hypocrisies, an all-too frequent charge levied against Republicans, are of no concern to the would-be Chairman. Either way, I’m thoroughly dissatisfied with his crippling inability to maintain consistency, in theory and practice.

If we’re to argue, as many would seemingly prefer, that an undying loyalty to conservative ideology is paramount to leading the RNC, why then would any self-respecting conservative support Ken Blackwell? On Monday’s candidate forum sponsored by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, Blackwell offered this duplicitous gem, saying, “Our candidates have either run a campaign like Jimmy Carter and then govern like Jimmy Carter or they’ve campaigned like Ronald Reagan and they govern like Jimmy Carter.” But to quote Jim Geraghty, “Let he who has never voted for Carter cast the first stone.” According to the Columbus Dispatch, Blackwell’s aversion to all things Carter is evidently post-1976: Crossing party-lines, Blackwell supported peanut farmer-extraordinaire Jimmy Carter.

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I certainly admire the fervent, almost Andrew Sullivan-like cheerleading among many conservative bloggers and pundits on behalf of former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s candidacy, but it’s important to give serious consideration to the facts, particularly when debating the future of the Party and the next Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sadly, few have.

Two narratives, with a staggering deference to the candidates’ records, have emerged in recent weeks as the clearest obstacles in Michael Steele’s path to securing the top Republican post, the first of which being his association with the centrist Republican Leadership Council, and second, of course, the notion, that while serving as its Chairman, GOPAC underperformed in fundraising, messaging, and candidate recruitment.

Republicans, believe it or not, have an opportunity to build a broad coalition, one unified under the basic tenants of conservatism – strong national defense, limited government interference, and greater personal liberties – but if we’re to survive, let alone build that coalition, the Party must allow for a diversity of opinion. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m unaware of any other method of building coalitions aside from reaching out to those with whom you have disagreements. After losing independents and moderates to the Obama campaign by a margin of 8 percent, Republicans simply can no longer afford to be tone deaf, and Steele, I dare say, understands this. His vision of a revitalized the Party is not one where we’ve sacrificed our conservative principles, but rather one where we’ve effectively advocated for them, even to unfriendly audiences, an act some have wrongly characterized as “tratorious.”

With Senator John Danforth and Governor Christine Todd Whitman, Steele, who won the endorsement of the National Right to Life organization in his bid for US Senate, worked to establish the RLC, a moderate group whose stated purpose is to advocate for “fiscally conservative, socially inclusive” policies and Republican candidates nationwide. However, when the rubber met the road, the RLC proved more successful at marginalizing social conservatives than in offering an “inclusive” agenda for Republicans. After resigning from the RLC’s executive board in July, Steele told the Washington Times that, despite working to make a more inclusive, productive, and vibrant Republican Party, he could not, in good conscious, further “alienate people” from the movement.

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