'NEW' GOP TAKING A TIP FROM FAUST.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I miss the old Republican Party, sometimes. They were a stodgy bunch of practical, pragmatic, principled old white men whose idea of a good time was balancing a checkbook. They believed in unbridled capitalism, compliant unions, no foreign entanglements and the occasional joke at the expense of a minority. Not a lot of laughs with those guys.

But today's GOP is where it's happenin' - it being unlimited deficit spending and an economic policy based upon the concept of ``Put it on the card, dude. My dad pays it.''

The national party leader is President Bush, and the core of his fiscal agenda remains a tax cut for the long-suffering top 1 percent of most- wealthy Americans, the same folks who continue to pull farther ahead of the middle class under the current, oppressive anti-rich tax system. Meanwhile, Bush wants to fight a war in Iraq for which he evidently plans on paying by cutting government support for school districts like San Diego's, which are filled with the children of military personnel who don't pay local property taxes and are off fighting the war. Party on, dude.

There are, of course, a lot of Republicans in Washington who are concerned about these irresponsible economic policies, but they say nothing publicly since the first rule of being a good modern Republican is the willingness to follow the ideological lemmings off the next social agenda cliff. I think the Republican Party would be a lot better off it were a little less well-disciplined, but it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining.

And if you don't find enough laughs in the antics of the national Republican Party, there's always the hilarious, self-destructive behavior of the California GOP. These guys could have easily beaten Democratic Gov. Gray Davis last November if only their candidate of choice, Bill Simon, had possessed two political neurons to rub together. He fooled the conservative leadership because he passed their ideological test and because he had money.

In today's politics, money equals smarts; the more money you give to politicians, the smarter they think you are.

By the way, Bill Simon recently formed a committee to investigate another run for governor in 2006. And the laughs just keep on coming.

The party loyalists gathered in Sacramento last weekend to heal their self-inflicted wounds by electing a new chairman. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the Sacramento opera company was staging ``Faust'' at the time, but at least that production was based on Goethe's version with the happy ending, rather than Marlowe's, where Faust declares moral bankruptcy and goes to hell. Literally.

Speaking of hell, conservative Bill Beck lost the GOP chairmanship fight to moderate Duf Sundheim, 489 votes to 666 - and, yes, some of the more conservative Republican conservatives were quick to take note of that last number because in their reality, such coincidences are no coincidence. It seems their Republican party is the Marlowe version of Faust.

So the moderates have finally grasped the reins of GOP power, although their options are a bit limited since, speaking of bankruptcy, the conservatives left $500,000 in the bank and debts of $535,000 - and did you ever think the GOP would be B-R-O-K-E? Well, should it be a surprise considering what they've done to the national economy?

And how are the party loyalists to avoid having their fax machines repossessed? No pun intended. Why, by funding a grass-roots recall election of Governor Davis, of course. Surely California voters will happily spend several million dollars of public money to restage the 2002 election just a few months before the 2006 election. And we won't think of the GOP as a bunch of bitter, annoying nut cases for forcing us to go through it again, now will we?

The fanatics remain fixated by Davis' ``negatives''; he comes across as humorless, greedy and conniving - but that's only because he is. Still, the new GOP leadership is against the recall, preferring to focus on winning California for George Bush. Now, somebody would have to sell his soul to make that happen. But I don't think even the fanatics expect to defeat Davis in this recall. Their real plan is to drain Democratic Party campaign funds, distract politicians from dealing with budget realities and force them instead to play politics, and generally throw some mud around, hoping more of it will stick to the Democrats than to themselves.

Gee, I had no idea you could play Faust as a farce. Funny idea.