IRVINE — Michael Schroeder, the chairman-to-be of the California Republican Party, is known for crushing his enemies.
One of those was Doris Allen, the former Cypress assemblywoman whose consignment to political oblivion Schroeder engineered when she broke ranks with the GOP leadership.
Then there was Paul Horcher, whose political career Schroeder helped scuttle when the Diamond Bar Republican assemblyman supported a Democrat for speaker.
And then there's the woman Schroeder's company sued in a business dispute and whom Schroeder asked a judge to jail, if necessary, to force her to turn over documents.
The woman is Dessa Schroeder, Michael's mother. The case, which takes up 27 volumes in Orange County Superior Court, is on hold pending an appeal.
"Yeah, I have a reputation for playing hardball," Schroeder said in an interview in his law office this week. "But I always play by the rules."
This weekend, Schroeder, the GOP vice chairman for the past two years, will almost certainly be chosen to lead the California Republican Party when the GOP's delegates gather at the Hyatt Regency in Sacramento.
The enfant terrible becomes elder statesman.
As the party chairman, Schroeder will face an array of challenges that, if unmet, threaten to undermine the clout of the California GOP.
For starters, Schroeder will lead the effort to pry the Assembly from the Democrats, who recaptured control last year. To do so, he must raise millions and millions of dollars, a task made more difficult by recent changes in campaign finance laws.
Schroeder will also have to prepare the GOP for what promises to be a bruising campaign to maintain the GOP's control of the governor's mansion in 1998.
He is also faced with the task of enforcing party discipline at a time when Proposition 198 will allow voters, for the first time, to cast their ballots in either party's primary.
And, perhaps most daunting, Schroeder wants to make the California GOP more appealing to women, Latino and black voters, who have shunned the party in great numbers.
Schroeder, 40, says that despite his history as political hatchet man, he is the one to unite the GOP and at the same time make it more diverse.
"I only fight for things that I believe in," Schroeder said. "I'm committed to this, and I have a plan."
