Steve Poizner

Steve Poizner Political party: Republican Occupation: state insurance commissioner Age: 53, born Corpus Christi, Texas City of residence: Los Gatos, Calif. Personal: wife Carol, one daughter Education: bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, University of Texas; MBA, Stanford University Career highlights: founder, 1983, Strategic Mapping software company; founder, 1995, SnapTrack Inc.; director, Critical Infrastructure Protection, National Security Council, 2001-02; volunteer teacher, Mount Pleasant High School, San Jose, 2002-03; state insurance commissioner, 2007 to present.

The California Republican Party, long given up for dead, is showing surprising signs of life. The last two decades have marked a slow, steady decline for a party that once yielded such national figures as Earl Warren, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Its registration rolls have fallen substantially. Worse is the recent record of statewide futility, a nearly unbroken skein of losses save for the 2003 election of Arnold Schwarzenegger under extraordinary circumstances (a snap recall vote)

At Mount Pleasant High School on Thursday morning, students practiced guitar in a courtyard and boned up on math before class. Parents met with the principal, and teens filtered in the doors. Faculty played an April Fool's joke, announcing that the school year had been extended. But amid the routine, tension rippled across the campus, set near the edge of a quiet San Jose neighborhood, over a book by Steve Poizner, a candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Poizner, who spent a year teaching at the school, donated thousands of dollars to help its students and recorded his experiences in the book, has been told he is no longer welcome there.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones is declaring a big success his department's 4-year-old program to pressure state-licensed insurance companies to stop investing in multinational firms that do business in Iran. Just eight of a total of 1,300 licensed insurers continue to invest in foreign-owned companies that are involved in the military, energy or nuclear sectors of the economy of the Islamic republic, he said. The State Department identifies the Middle Eastern nation as a state sponsor of terrorism.

For the first time, prominent consumer advocate Harvey Rosenfield is backing a Republican in the race for state insurance commissioner -- a move that may change the odds in the race. Rosenfield, the author of 1988's landmark Proposition 103 auto insurance initiative, has always been considered a Democratic ally. But the party's candidate in the Nov. 7 election is Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, whom Rosenfield has criticized for trying to water down Proposition 103 while in the state Assembly.

With former congressman Tom Campbell dropping out of the California governor's race Thursday, Republican voters will now be faced with a sharp choice: either a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businessman who has contributed $19 million toward his own election campaign, or a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businesswoman who has contributed $19 million toward her campaign. Campbell was considered a long shot in large part because the UC Berkeley business school dean couldn't keep up with his deep-pocketed competitors in fundraising.

A consumer group Thursday called on California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner to release all documents related to his investigation of proposed double-digit rate increases by Anthem Blue Cross for customers who buy individual policies. Consumer Watchdog also asked Poizner to hold at least four public hearings across the state as part of his inquiry into premium increases by California's largest for-profit insurer. Woodland Hills-based Anthem agreed to delay its rate hikes of as much as 39% until May 1 while an outside actuary, hired by Poizner's office, reviews the company's spending on medical claims.

Along the south shore of San Francisco Bay, from the bookstores of Palo Alto to the estates of Atherton, one man's checkbook has created an Assembly race where it otherwise wouldn't exist. In a district dominated by Democrats, Republican Steve Poizner has spent $4.8 million of his own money -- writing checks of $100,000 or more to himself every week since August -- to pay for a blizzard of television ads and mailers, and has raised $1 million more.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Poizner pulled himself out of the running Wednesday for a seat on the California Public Utilities Commission, conceding that his financial holdings were too big and complex to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Poizner, a 48-year-old moderate Republican from Los Gatos, said he planned to run for state insurance commissioner next year instead.

Republican candidates for governor Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner met in a generally genteel debate Monday evening that skipped lightly over detailed solutions to California's grievous fiscal mess in favor of the familiar arguments that each has made for months as they drive toward the June 8 primary. Whitman argued that she would bring an outsider's perspective to Sacramento and present the sharpest possible contrast to the presumptive Democratic nominee, former governor and current Atty.

State insurance regulators and trade groups have settled a pair of lawsuits stemming from efforts to pressure insurers to stop investing in corporations engaged in energy, nuclear or defense-related work in Iran. California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones announced the settlement late Friday. At issue was a controversial 2009 initiative by Jones' predecessor, Steve Poizner, that threatened to penalize insurance companies and publicize their investments in companies that indirectly benefit the government of Iran.

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has ratcheted up the pressure in a long-running dispute with Cypress-based PacifiCare. Poizner has ordered the health insurer not to pay $120 million in dividends to two subsidiaries of its parent company, saying the money may be needed to cover possible penalties in an administrative case brought by the Department of Insurance. The department has accused PacifiCare of violating state law nearly 1 million times from 2006 to 2008 by mismanaging medical records, losing patient documents and failing to pay doctors what they were owed.

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner rejected a call by industry financial analysts for a 28% increase in workers' compensation insurance premiums, which are paid by most of the state's employers. Instead, Poizner, in one of his last major acts before leaving office in January, recommended that rates stay flat. He suggested that insurers could do much more to cut costs by adopting a number of reforms authorized by the Legislature six years ago. "Our nation and our state are in the midst of a recession and unemployment rates are sky high," Poizner said Friday.

Voters' viewpoint Re "Why she lost," Opinion, Nov. 4 Arnold Steinberg doesn't get it quite right when he says that "for [Meg Whitman] to win, she needed to be liked. " It would be more accurate to say that for a wealthy businessperson to win, they need to prove to voters that they are likable. Why? Because Californians have been led to believe (by the media, by celebrity pundits, by liberal professors) that successful businesspeople are not to be given the public trust.

Meg Whitman had the kind of resources most candidates only dream of, and she was a political outsider in the quintessential anti-incumbent year. So what went wrong? In the end, the vulgarity of Whitman's spending trumped any real connection with the voters. It's one thing to have money. It's another to flaunt it, and Whitman flaunted it from the moment she announced her campaign budget. Consequently, the story of her campaign was always less about substance and more about how much she was spending.

Don't laugh now Re "When politics is no joke," Oct. 28 The irony is spilling out of my spleen. You can't make this stuff up. The Mad Hatter "tea party" is taking us down the fascist rabbit hole. And our leading satirists (cynics) save us from our worst nightmare by holding a counter (culture?) rally at the Washington Mall. This would be a cosmic joke if not for the truth(iness) we are actually facing. Wasn't there a movie or play or something like this? "Cabaret"?

Running for governor can be alluring. The crowds applaud, the staff genuflects; even the persistent frustrations of traffic melt away in the back seat of a luxury vehicle piloted from event to event by someone else. But there are times, and last week was one of them, when running for governor can also take on the feel of a fraternity hazing, when the candidates are not masters of the universe but, rather, supplicants. That is particularly true in this phase of the campaign -- nine months before the June 2010 primary -- when the emphasis is on selling your candidacy to your party's truest believers.

With a week to go until election day, this is no time for a candidate to let up or take anything for granted in the run for governor. In other words, if I were a billionaire who hadn't voted in decades, but I'd spent $141 million trying to buy your vote, I wouldn't put my wallet away with less than a week to go. I'd make it an even $150 million, or maybe more. Why leave any doubt that I gave it my best shot? It's Meg Whitman, of course, who dropped all those shekels, along with another $20 million from donors.

The long, contentious and extraordinarily expensive California primary campaign came to a close Monday with a flurry of last-minute electioneering meant to lure any voters still undecided despite — or perhaps because of — the blizzard of nasty ads that has marked this election season. As the last of tens of millions of dollars in television spots flew over the airwaves, the frontrunners in the Republican races for governor and senator signaled their confidence by tossing general election gibes at their prospective Democratic opponents.