Republican Party

After months of criticizing Democratic healthcare proposals from the sidelines, House Republicans this week stepped up efforts to promote their own plan and challenge critics' efforts to portray the GOP as the "party of no." Unlike the Democrats' strategy of trying to provide near-universal coverage and force other major changes to the insurance system, the Republican approach is an incremental one that would do far less to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. It would instead give priority to controlling healthcare costs.

The math seems pretty simple. But apparently it's too rigorous for many Republican politicians. To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government. Some politicians are in denial. Some are demagoguing. Some are just ducking. Scared. The scared are rather pathetic.

Teen pregnancy and sex education were thrust into the spotlight this week when Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin revealed that her 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. Palin's running mate, John McCain, and the GOP platform say children should be taught that abstinence until marriage is the only safe way to avoid pregnancy and disease. Palin's position is less clear.

A new Republican Party television ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to "call me" is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts a landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.

President Obama's choice to head the Labor Department is trying to overcome resistance to her nomination from Republican senators, who contend she dodged important questions during her confirmation hearing. Rep. Hilda L. Solis, a Democrat from El Monte, is one of several prominent Cabinet nominees still awaiting confirmation more than a week after the president took office. Eric H. Holder Jr., tapped to be attorney general, is likely to be confirmed by the Senate on Monday.

In 1994, Rush Limbaugh was a field marshal in the Republican revolution, rallying troops fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined to shake Washington upside down. Fifteen years later, Republicans are politically hobbled and Democrats are fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined, along with their new president, to shake Washington upside down. And again there is Limbaugh, master of the talk radio universe, unchanged and unbowed.

Stephanie Burns and Ben Parkinson strolled down sun-drenched Fillmore Street with political thievery on their minds. Both are grass-roots volunteers for Republican presidential contender Ron Paul, a Texas congressman whose libertarian views might seem to make him a tough sell in this legendarily left-wing city.

Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP's broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid. Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents.

Silvan Johnson adores Sarah Palin, belongs to a conservative discussion group and fumes at President Obama's spending policies. But when it comes to picking a new congressional representative for her upstate New York district, she is in no mood to help the Republican Party. In fact, Johnson and many other conservatives want to use a Nov. 3 special election to teach the GOP a lesson about sticking to conservative values -- even though that lesson could mean the party loses a House seat it has held for decades.

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch.

As the Republican Party's chances of success in the fall elections increase week by week, so too has the number of Republican candidates jumping into primaries across the country. Party officials claim to welcome the enthusiasm, but in many places it's the sort of welcome reserved for an uninvited guest. Or eight uninvited guests, as is the case in Arkansas, where the lineup of candidates wanting to challenge Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln has swelled to nine. An open seat in Tennessee has four Republicans vying for the nomination, and one erstwhile Republican running as an independent.

Republican politicians and conservative activists are launching a ballot campaign to suspend California's landmark global-warming law, in what they hope will serve as a showcase for a national backlash against climate regulations. Supporters say they have "solid commitments" of nearly $600,000 to pay signature gatherers for a November initiative aimed at delaying curbs on the greenhouse gas emissions of power plants and factories until the state's unemployment rate drops. GOP gubernatorial candidates and Tea Party organizers paint the 2006 law, considered a model for other state and federal efforts, as a job-killing interference in the economy.

Joseph Cao -- the most politically endangered member of Congress, the one and only Republican who voted for President Obama's healthcare plan, a target of Democrats and a source of frustration to many in his own party -- is facing a hometown crowd. "Oftentimes I'm pretty sure that decisions I make might not be the decisions you would make," the lawmaker tells about 125 people lured by free beer and jambalaya to a smoky tavern near downtown. "You might want to scream and bang your head against the wall" or "reach out and strangle me," he continues, but one constant, his one guiding principle, is "a focus on service . . . how I could better serve the people of my district."

A real case of deja vu Re "Conservatives criticize activist after his arrest," Jan. 28 I find it troubling that three of the four Republican activists arrested for illegally entering the office of a U.S. senator in New Orleans ran conservative newspapers at their respective colleges. None of these young men was a lone wolf with a grudge. None was an anonymous Average Joe plotting a crime. These presumably were the cream of the young Republicans, the best their party has to offer for the future.

With four months to go before the June primary election, the two leading Republican candidates for governor have poured more than $58 million of their personal fortunes into their campaigns while the presumptive Democratic nominee, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, has conserved his money for the fight ahead. The 71-year-old Brown, a former two-term governor who is still unannounced in the race, spent only $370,000 last year, mostly on mundane items such as $79,000 in office expenses, according to campaign filings released Monday.

In an unprecedented town hall meeting, President Obama went toe-to-toe Friday with some of his fiercest critics -- a ballroom-full of House Republicans -- accusing them of derailing his healthcare overhaul while they complained about being shut out of the political process. The president's appearance at an annual retreat for House Republicans was intended to be a gesture of bipartisanship. Instead, it devolved into a respectful but surprisingly blunt exercise in political finger-pointing, defensiveness and gamesmanship.

Republican Party leaders on Friday quashed an effort to impose a political litmus test on its candidates, sidestepping a fight that threatened to divide the GOP and highlighted a split between purists and pragmatists over how best to steer the party in 2010 and beyond. The swift resolution of the matter -- when the chief sponsor abruptly withdrew his proposal in favor of a vague substitute -- provided an anticlimactic finish to a debate that roiled GOP insiders for weeks ahead of the party's winter meeting in Hawaii.

President Obama will extend a hand to his political antagonists during a visit to a House Republican retreat today in Baltimore. But the exchange -- part of his election-year attempt to generate more bipartisanship -- is unlikely to change Republican behavior, strategists and former members of Congress say. "Republicans are emboldened. They think Obama has overshot the runway, and they're going to stick with their strategy," said Scott Reed, a Republican consultant. As they left Washington for the three-day strategy session, Republican leaders did not seem to be in a frame of mind for compromising.

When Matt Clemente went to a December meeting of "tea party" activists in Worcester, Mass., he was shocked to find the hall packed. "They were all talking about Scott Brown," he said. That was when Clemente, a student at College of the Holy Cross, realized Brown wasn't just another Republican running a long-shot campaign for the seat held by liberal Sen. Edward M. Kennedy since 1962. He actually had a chance to win, and the conservative activists who had been organizing around the country against the healthcare overhaul, bank bailouts and increased government regulation could put him over the top if they could get organized in time.

When Republican state legislators decided last month that they needed to escape Sacramento and kick back in a more relaxed environment to hash out issues, they headed for a luxury beach resort in Santa Barbara. Such sojourns don't come cheap, so oil and tobacco firms and other companies that are pressing an agenda in the Capitol funneled $120,000 to a group that picked up much of the tab. About 25 Republican senators and Assembly members and a dozen aides attended the retreat at Fess Parker's Doubletree Resort.