Republican Party

Republican officials voted Friday to elect their first black national party chairman, a response in part to election defeats that have left the party's base more white and Southern at a time when the country is growing more diverse. The election of Michael Steele puts in the limelight a charismatic African American who has championed outreach to minorities as key to the party's future.

The economy is nose-diving. Unemployment rages. A yawning budget hole looms. In these gloomy times, statehouse Republicans see a chance to spur California renewal by refighting a few past defeats. GOP lawmakers have tugged old battles over workplace rules and the environment into the historic winter budget talks now underway in the Capitol. From the position of the majority Democrats, who need at least a few Republican votes to pass a spending plan, it pays to listen.

Hurting and in disarray after a devastating election -- their second in a row -- that put a Democrat in the White House and widened the opposing party's control of Congress, Republicans can now take solace in the fact that they seem to have chosen a strong figure to lead them. We refer, of course, to talk-radio rabble-rouser Rush Limbaugh ... oh, and there's also Michael Steele.

What in heaven's name does Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have against honeybees? That question haunted my days after I saw the Kentucky Republican on TV fulminating about a provision he found in the proposed government stimulus package. The provision, he said, would provide $150 million for "honeybee insurance." "This is nonsense," he said, as if he took it personally. You had to think he got stung as a kid or maybe caught a local swarm in the act of recruiting aphids for Al Qaeda.

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.

The monthlong struggle over the stimulus plan left behind a smoking battlefield of partisanship, but it also set the stage for a political collision on a scale seldom seen in Washington -- a showdown on a succession of even more divisive issues that could shadow the future of the two major parties.

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.

He started out as a champion of their ideals, the leader of a group of conservative Republican state senators devoted to cutting the size of government and blocking tax increases for their rural and suburban constituents. But over time, state Sen. Dave Cogdill came to see the crisis facing California as bigger than his own closely held views. Then late Tuesday, two former allies walked into his office to deliver the news that his reign was over.

After five years as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger came full circle on Friday: The film star who promised to rescue California from its fiscal wreckage without raising taxes signed into law $12.5 billion in tax hikes. With that, the Republican governor broke one of the few bonds left between his shrunken party and California's mainstream voters, marring its hard-won image as a guardian against higher taxes. "Their last gasp has been taken from them," said Larry N.

At Terry's Coffee Trader in Old Town Murrieta on Friday, the drinks arrived in sturdy glass mugs while the outrage poured out by the bucketful. Fueled by passage of a state budget with billions in new taxes, the anger in this caffeinated salon of conservatism had reached fever pitch. "The Republicans should have stood their ground," fumed 70-year-old Tony Dragonetti. "Abel Maldonado is sick, and so are the other Republicans who voted for this.