Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post calls out his journalistic brethren: “Palin’s timing [at the GOP dinner] was good because we’d pretty much exhausted the whole Are-Rush-and-Newt-the-Face-of-the-GOP meme, anyway. And plenty of pundits would rather yak about her chances in 2012 than discuss, say, the deductibility of employer-provided health insurance.”

I wonder if Kurtz’s colleague Dan Balz got the memo: “On Monday night, when the spotlight was on the Republicans, rather than the president, the GOP allowed lowbrow chatter about Palin’s attendance, rather than something more substantive, to dominate.”

Got that? The GOP allowed lowbrow chatter about Palin to dominate. They should have used the Rovian mind-control rays to ensure that substantive topics dominated the discussion in places like, you know, Dan Balz’s column.

On a somewhat related topic, I’ll be on Joe Mathieu’s Press Pool on Sirius/XM POTUS around 12:30 Eastern, discussing the USA Today poll showing “a 52% majority of those surveyed couldn’t come up with a name when asked to specify ‘the main person’ who speaks for Republicans today.”

Let’s presume for a moment that respondents didn’t think they were being asked to name the person(s) from Maine who speaks for Republicans today.

If the year were 2012, and Americans didn’t know who the main person who speaks for Republicans was, it would be a problem. But we are not in a presidential election, and thus the requirements of representing the party are different. This “who leads the GOP” question is asked incessantly — Chris Matthews seems obsessed with it — and yet it’s not particularly relevant to the challenge before Republicans right now and in the near future.

You don’t need a popular figure to win a public argument. The sudden shift in polling numbers on Gitmo shows that if you make the case clearly, compellingly, and with supporting evidence, you can beat Obama even if you have the approval rating of Dick Cheney. President Obama is a great speaker, but that doesn’t automatically translate into winning every argument.

In Congress, the faces of the GOP are Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Maybe they’re not the most dashing figures to stroll across Capitol Hill. But they don’t have to be; they just have to keep the caucuses unified and pick off wavering Democrats when they can. Sen. Jeff Sessions is going to lead the GOP in its questioning of Sonia Sotomayor. That’s his role.

Then you’ve got everybody else, in and out of office, each making their case for alternatives to the Obama agenda and pointing out the runaway spending, skyrocketing debt, etc.: Mitt Romney, Newt, Rush, Michael Steele, Palin, etc. If we need to illustrate the folly of some of Obama’s ideas, apolitical figures like Warren Buffett, Jim Cramer, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, and Rick Santelli provide credibility well beyond that of any political figure.

But right now, there are two key tests of each party’s electoral clout, and in both cases, the Republican candidate is currently ahead by a considerable margin. That’s the only circumstance in which you need one clear face in 2009.

By the way, buried in the 40th or so paragraph of that USA Today story: “Like the Democrats or not, there was a broad consensus about who speaks for the party. Obama was named by 58%. He was followed by 11% who cited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 3% who cited Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Twenty-one percent couldn’t come up with a name.”

If 21 percent of Americans couldn’t name the person who speaks for the Democrats, are we surprised that they couldn’t name a Republican?