Steve Poizner

With election day little more than a week away, the two major Republican gubernatorial candidates are blanketing the airwaves with television advertising, each slashing the other as too liberal in an appeal to the party's conservative primary voters. Television has always been the path to voters in California, but the twist this year is the ads' wall-to-wall frequency, a clear demonstration of the vast personal wealth that the candidates have been tapping into as they seek to become the state's next Republican nominee for governor.

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner committed his personal wealth Tuesday to defeating a Feb. 5 term limits ballot initiative that would allow current legislators to stick around a few more years. Poizner called the initiative a "naked power grab" by sitting Democratic legislators and said he would spend at least $1.5 million to educate voters against it. A national group called U.S. Term Limits also donated $1.

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner recommended Tuesday that insurers slash the rates they charge businesses for workers' compensation coverage by 14.2%, topping the 8% cut proposed by the largest insurer. Poizner also warned insurance companies that he would send in auditors to make sure they don't delay or deny needed medical care for injured workers, citing complaints from advocates for injured workers.

For the second time in a year, the California insurance commissioner has rejected an industry rating agency's proposal that he recommend that insurers significantly raise rates paid by employers for workers' compensation insurance. Steve Poizner today rejected a call from the California Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau to hike rates by 22.8% for policies that would be written or renewed after Jan. 1. By law, the insurance commissioner is charged with reviewing the benchmark rate considered by insurance companies in pricing future policies and recommending changes -- up or down.

The Democrats' fumbling of their term-limits proposal has increased the once-unfathomable possibility that California's next governor will be another Republican. That Republican would be state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, 50, who made a fortune in the dot-com boom and then turned his attention to politics.

The two candidates vying in a low-decibel race to be elected California's top insurance regulator couldn't have more different qualifications for the job. One has worked for government all his adult life. The other has spent all but two years in the private sector. But each claims his experience gives him the talents and tools to protect consumers and bolster the state's business climate. They are Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, and Silicon Valley businessman Steve Poizner, a Republican.

In the new movie "2012," whose video trailers were bombarding television airwaves last week, the world as we know it gives way three years hence under a siege of floods, eruptions, undulating continents and earthquakes. In other words, it's not much different from what is happening in California, fiscally speaking, except that the state will be lucky to hang on that long. To recap: the state's chief budget analyst reported last week that California faces a $21-billion deficit through the next fiscal year.

The scene would have made any campaign advisor cringe. GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner was being shouted at by a throng of students and officials from a struggling San Jose high school where he had worked for a year. The book he wrote on that experience was patronizing nonsense, the protesters said. They demanded an accounting and told him he was not welcome on campus. The conventional campaign playbook seemed to dictate that the candidate now rush to roll out a bold initiative or make some other move to shift voter attention elsewhere, fast.

Some of the major Republicans vying to become California's next governor or U.S. senator have more money than others. Some are better known. Some are more in sync with their party's traditional views. But what all five have in common as they look toward the June 8 primary is a determination to tap what they see as public fury over the failures of government. "Our government is out of control and out of touch, and so we will take it back and we will make it work," U.S. Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina told hundreds of delegates at a weekend convention of Republicans in the Silicon Valley.

In recent years, the lieutenant governor's office under Cruz Bustamante fell $300,000 behind in office rent, and vendors exasperated by unpaid bills shut off cellphone service, stopped maintaining copy machines and threatened to cancel credit cards.