Recall Newsom

The Case Against America’s
Most Corrupt Governor

Kevin Kiley

Copyright © 2021 by Kevin Kiley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although this publication is designed to provide accurate information in regard to the subject matter covered, and every effort was made to do so, the publisher and the author assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any other inconsistencies herein. This publication is meant as a source of valuable information for the reader, however it is not meant as a replacement for your own research and analysis.

First Edition January 2021

Cover art by John Adlai
Interior layout by Teddi Deppner
Production by Joshua Hoover

“Gavin Newsom” photo by Gage Skidmore.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Kevin Kiley
www.CapitolQuagmire.com

Preface

A Tale of Two Speeches

On March 16, 2020, I rose to address my colleagues in the California State Assembly.

“Today,” I began, “I am supporting our Governor. I call on every legislator and every Californian, regardless of political preference, to trust in Governor Newsom’s leadership and listen to his guidance.”

I spoke from my desk on the far-left side of the Assembly. The Chamber is a grand, magnificent space, modeled after Britain’s House of Commons. I’ve always enjoyed hosting classes on field trips and seeing the students look around in awe. Above the dais hangs a portrait of Abraham Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation. Sometimes I imagine an animated Honest Abe, like a painting in Harry Potter, musing at the proceedings below as the People’s representatives pass legislation to designate an official state sport (surfing), state dinosaur (Augustynolophus morrisi), and even a state nut (almond, pecan, walnut and pistachio—as it turns out, all technically seeds).

But frivolity is not usually the reason I imagine our 16th President to be shaking his painted head. More commonly, it’s something much worse: corruption. Lincoln must have encountered his share of it as an Illinois state representative in the 1830s. But there is no comparison, past or present, to what happens underneath the dome of the California State Capitol.

When I rise to give a speech in the Assembly, it is usually to oppose some corrupt scheme that Special Interests have cooked up, to be rubber stamped by their legislative enablers. Sometimes I succeed in killing such legislation, but more often what is said on the Assembly Floor doesn’t matter. The outcome is preordained; debate is nonexistent or farcical. Whenever I speak, the Majority Leader is on guard to try to find ways to cut me off. Every year, new methods are devised to stifle discussion and public participation.

The contrast could not be greater between the grandeur of the Assembly Chamber and the tawdriness of its proceedings. Observers are often taken aback by the absence of any apparent sense of responsibility or public mindedness in this room where 80 men and women are trusted with matters of profound importance to 40 million people. Yet on this day, March 16, I hoped it would be different. I tried to summon a sense of our collective responsibility as we faced an impending crisis.

“I rise today at a moment without precedent in any of our experience,” I said. “For nearly 40 million Californians, 330 million Americans, and people around the world, this is a surreal time, a sharp and sudden break from all normalcy. It’s a moment of crisis in every sense—social paralysis, economic upheaval, and mortal peril. The partisan rituals of ordinary politics have no place in these extraordinary times.”

Now, even at this moment, I was no fan of Gavin Newsom. In his first year in office, I watched him hand over the keys to the Governor’s Office to Special Interests that spent millions electing him. He signed one of the most corrupt laws ever passed in the United States, Assembly Bill 5, which put tens of thousands of independent contractors out of work. He viciously went after our poorest kids by seeking to close the public schools that serve them best. He’d proven the very embodiment of our Capitol’s corruption. And unlike his predecessor Jerry Brown, who made an effort to build relationships with legislators, Newsom seemed to find it beneath him. Even favorable media outlets gave his first year poor reviews.

But none of that mattered to me on March 16. Our state faced a novel threat, and Newsom was our Governor. We needed to work together. From my desk in the Assembly I called on our state’s elected leaders to put aside any differences.

“A relationship of trust, openness, dialogue, and accessibility between Californians and their elected representatives has never been more important,” I said. “We’re in this together, and the only way we can meet these challenges is together—with ingenuity and resourcefulness, with goodwill and compassion, with strength and solidarity. Social distance need not mean societal dissonance, or spiritual discord. In a way, the very interconnectedness that made this virus so quick to spread also gives us the capacity to defeat it.”

The essence of political leadership, in my view, is bringing people together for a shared purpose. Beyond the griminess and sharp edges, the practice of politics can appeal to the better angels of our nature (in Lincoln’s memorable words) as we pursue something larger than ourselves. This is what I hoped our Governor would do at this uncertain moment in our state’s history.

My own background was not a political one. I had worked as a high school teacher in inner-city Los Angeles and later as a prosecutor. I left behind a promising career in the private sector to run for office because I saw the corruption of our state’s politics causing its steady and seemingly irreversible decline. I sensed this was linked to the erosion of government by the people and the toxicity of our political culture. As of this day in March, I had spent three years fighting for change at the Capitol—an uphill battle if there ever was one. But I thought perhaps the common threat posed by the novel coronavirus would allow us to see ourselves as one people again, to reclaim a distinctive state spirit that was drifting away.

“We have another advantage,” I said, “a can-do sense of possibility that is distinctly Californian—an unmatched ability to take our circumstances and make the best of them. That’s what we must do, now more than ever. Whether we can rise to the occasion in the days and weeks ahead will determine the fate of untold lives and will shape what our state looks like on the other side.”

I could not have imagined that almost a year later, the other side would still be out of sight. Nor could I have known that for most of the year, Abraham Lincoln would have the Assembly Chamber to himself. The Legislature decided to simply stop working, while at the other end of the Capitol, in a ring of offices known as the Horseshoe, Governor Gavin Newsom was all-too present.

* * *

Nearly nine months after that speech, on December 7, 2020, I addressed the State Assembly again. This was the one and only day the Legislature was in session over a span of four and a half months. We met not in the august Assembly Chamber but, for social distancing reasons, down the street at the Golden One basketball arena—home of a Sacramento Kings team I’ve been cursed with rooting for my whole life. It was, to put it mildly, a very different setting for a very different speech.

“When I addressed this Assembly on March 16, I said the partisan rituals of ordinary politics have no place in these extraordinary times. I called on every legislator and every Californian, regardless of political preference, to trust in Governor Newsom’s leadership and listen to his guidance.

“Gavin Newsom made a mockery of that trust. Within weeks, he hid from the Legislature a $1 billion no-bid deal with a political ally, outsourced the most important decisions to powerful Special Interests, and started talking about using the coronavirus as an opportunity for a ‘new progressive era.’

“But the outcomes have been anything but progressive. Our economy is doing about the worst in the country, our kids in poor communities are faring worst of all, our public health performance is middling. With the basic pillars of a liberal democracy dismantled, our citizenry is disenfranchised and divided.

“The fact is this Governor has lost all credibility with the public. Whatever the shortcomings of this Legislature, in this moment we have one inherent advantage: we are not Gavin Newsom.”

* * *

This book covers the fateful months between those two speeches, as California suffered through the worst COVID-19 response in the country and perhaps the larger Western world.

I tried in every way I could to get Gavin Newsom to govern in the public interest. But instead, he used this moment of utmost vulnerability to promote his own political ambitions and reward his Special Interest benefactors, putting every perversity of California politics on steroids. As Californians rose to the occasion heroically, their Governor let them down repeatedly. “When history called, he flopped,” wrote Jerry Brown’s Press Secretary, Gil Duran.

Whoever wins a Recall election will certainly have shortcomings, as anyone does. But that person will have the same advantage I told our Legislature we have. He or she will not be Gavin Newsom.

Introduction

We the People

If you are looking for a book arguing that COVID-19 is a hoax, this is not it. If you are looking for a comprehensive case against lockdowns in general, that is not its purpose. If you are looking for a broadside against liberal policies, there are plenty of other such books available.

This is a book about the distinctive failures of Governor Gavin Newsom, who has mismanaged the COVID crisis in a way that embodies the endemic corruption of California state government. In the process, he’s taken that corruption to new depths—with devastating consequences for millions of people.

I am a Republican, and my political views are readily available elsewhere in the public domain. But this book is not red meat for partisans. It is meant for liberal Democrats just as much as conservative Republicans. In these pages, I do not advocate for any particular policies; I simply oppose those which result from corruption. That is because I do not believe that political disagreement over policies or values is enough for a recall. We hash out those differences in regularly scheduled elections. In fact, I was skeptical of the 2003 Gray Davis Recall, even though I was no supporter of Davis himself.

That’s one reason I am writing this book: I am generally recall reluctant. I also believe that recalls, as a tool for throwing out politicians, should not be led by politicians themselves. They should be citizens’ movements. When I first met the Lead Proponent of the Newsom Recall, Orrin Heatlie, it was February 2020. Over coffee at Bill’s Donuts in Granite Bay, I told him I wished him luck and admired his efforts to mobilize Californians seeking change, but that I could not lend my support to the Recall at that time—as much as I would have liked to see Governor Newsom out of office.

While our Constitution allows a recall to be initiated for any reason, for me to support one three criteria must be met. First, a recall should respond to a betrayal of the public trust—the use of power vested in the officeholder for purposes other than the solemn duties of the office. Second, a recall should respond to a need for fundamental change. Finally, a recall should be a last resort.

At the time of this writing in January 2021, I believe all three criteria have been abundantly met. And Orrin Heatlie along with countless others have built what is truly a citizens’ movement in every sense. I am writing this book to promote their efforts, in a supporting role. They are the lead actors.

A Betrayal of the Public Trust

Even standard corruption like that on display during Newsom’s first year—or every day in our Legislature—would not be grounds for me to actively support a recall. What is exceptional about Gavin Newsom’s COVID era performance is the pernicious combination of corruption and lawlessness. He has compromised our institutions of self-government—the rule of law, checks and balances, separation of powers, representative democracy, and the Constitution itself—to promote himself and the cash-flush Special Interests that put him in office. It is Newsom’s abuse of extraordinary emergency powers for personal political gain, with a totalizing impact on California life, that makes this the most meritorious recall in our state’s history.

In the pages that follow, I will discuss how Governor Newsom has betrayed the public trust in ways without equal in the United States today or in the history of California. In particular, Part II identifies the eight defining characteristics of Newsom’s worst-in-the-nation COVID response.

Self-promotional: Soon after declaring a State of Emergency, Newsom began making far-reaching decisions based more on what would garner him press coverage than what would protect Californians. As he made the rounds on daytime and late-night talk shows, he pursued increasingly dishonest, damaging, and desperate ploys to compete with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for national attention. To many observers, Newsom treated the arrival of the coronavirus on our shores as the launch of his 2024 presidential campaign.

Lawless: To get his name in the headlines as quickly as possible, Newsom fashioned himself in the mold of an ancient Roman dictator, falsely claiming the emergency “centralized the State’s powers” in his hands. He changed over 400 laws by fiat, created entirely new law unrelated to public health, and left Californians without a voice in their own government. He repeatedly clashed with lawmakers of both parties as he refused to stop acting unilaterally. I prosecuted the legal case against the Governor along with my fellow legislator James Gallagher, and in a seminal decision, a California Superior Court ruled the Governor had abused his emergency powers and repeatedly violated the California Constitution.

Corrupt: Newsom has used the State of Emergency to richly reward the Special Interests that spent millions electing him and whose favor he would need to run for higher office. He appointed the nation’s single largest partisan donor, vanity presidential candidate Tom Steyer, to head California’s economic recovery. At the behest of his biggest benefactor, the California Teachers Association, he kept schools closed as long as any state, doing incalculable harm to millions of kids. He devoted scarce budget dollars to enforce AB 5 in order to increase profits for massive union conglomerates. He became so ensnared with lobbyists that he was forced to appoint a “Chief Ethics Advisor.”

Unscientific: Because it was driven by politics and self-interest, the Governor’s COVID response has been denounced by health experts as unscientific, counterproductive, and not based on data. Newsom repeatedly refused to provide evidence for his shutdown orders, and multiple courts found there to be none. He haphazardly changed the rules time and again without a coherent explanation. Unlike any governor, he imposed lockdowns for non-health reasons, such as “equity.” He enforced bans on activities such as outdoor dining, bowling, youth sports, and playgrounds that virtually no other state did. Newsom even put up barriers to a vaccine in order to make a political statement.

Partisan: From the beginning, Newsom celebrated COVID-19 as the dawning of a “new progressive era,” as “an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.” Already America’s most partisan governor, Newsom took his divisiveness to perverse levels when he released a spurious chart purporting to rank “red” and “blue” states by COVID cases. Even as our state’s problems mounted, he spent his time trolling United States Senators, comparing the leader of the Senate to a “jellyfish, coral, slug, snail, or octopus,” and posting a fake news video about a U.S. Supreme Court nominee that he was forced to delete.

Hypocritical: Newsom will always be remembered for sitting at a crowded table, without a mask, to fete a lobbyist at a meal with a $12,000 wine bill at a time he was forcing Californians to stay home and failing to deliver the modest unemployment checks they were owed. But the French Laundry scandal only scratched the surface of Newsom’s hypocrisy. He sent his own children to private school for in-person instruction even as he forced millions of less fortunate kids to learn from home. He repeatedly blamed the people of California for the spread of the virus even as he asked them to make pointless sacrifices not linked to public health. He spoke of equity and inclusiveness while taking actions that were an assault on those values.

Incompetent: Newsom oversaw the country’s worst and most Orwellian unemployment office, which has kept millions of deserving Californians waiting for benefits as billions flew out the door to prisoners posing as claimants. Newsom used agency personnel to harass small business owners with audits and required independent contractors to name names of business partners who could be harassed with audits of their own. Newsom also neglected basic preparations for California’s data systems, leading to a major data “glitch,” after which he disappeared for a week before accepting the resignation of his public health director. To avoid accountability, the Governor repeatedly directed self-investigations of his own Administration and denied information to the public.

Neglectful: Amid Newsom’s publicity-seeking and political-calculating, he neglected the basics of a public health response. California was among the slowest states in the country to ramp up testing. Newsom refused to allow testing at pharmacies and failed to sufficiently develop contact tracing tools. He did not do what was needed to protect vulnerable populations, and despite the urgent warnings of a Democratic lawmaker, presided over the “worst prison health screw up in state history.” He kept in place Special Interest-backed barriers to working on the healthcare front lines and, amid a record surge in cases, did not utilize 99.979 percent of workers who had signed up for the California Health Corps.

The results of these betrayals of the public trust speak for themselves. While California had imposed the nation’s strictest lockdown and most sweeping school closures, at the time of this writing it had the most new COVID cases per capita in the country in addition to nearly the worst unemployment rate. It is difficult to imagine a more consequential failure of political leadership.

A Need for Fundamental Change

California’s problems were boiling over before COVID-19. Despite boasting the world’s fifth largest economy, we have up to half the nation’s homeless. We also have the highest rate of poverty, nearly the worst income inequality, the highest housing prices, among the worst roads and bridges, and the worst education for poor students in the continental United States. A recent survey showed a staggering 53 percent of residents were thinking of leaving. When over half of your people want out, that’s called a failed state.

Consider a few headlines from eclectic news sources in the months leading up to COVID: California Is Becoming Unlivable (The Atlantic). Why Would Anyone Live in California? (Washington Times). It’s the End of California as We Know it (New York Times). How Does California Ever Survive? (CalMatters). As Victor Davis Hanson put it, “Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.”

Gavin Newsom’s mishandling of COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated these trends. Sustained double digit unemployment has deepened poverty and inequality. The achievement gaps in our schools, already disgraceful, have grown considerably. And Californians now sense that the American dream is dead: In a recent poll, nearly two-thirds say kids growing up in California today will be worse off than their parents. Adding further clarity to this picture, data released in December shows California just had its worst population growth in a century, losing a net 135,600 people to other states. Mark Baldassare with the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California called the numbers “really startling,” saying, “This isn’t the Golden State of the past,” where people came from all over “to find their way to the California dream.”

Our state’s inherent beauty and countless wonders, our population’s peerless aptitude and esprits de corps, are being overwhelmed by the failure of our politics. And that failure has a specific cause: the capture of our State Capitol.

California’s Capitol is not truly run by elected representatives, but by what’s known as the “Third House.” That’s the term for a corps of Special Interest lobbyists, with offices encircling the Capitol, that accounts for the vast majority of political funding in California. It’s called the Third House because these lobbyists control the first two houses, the Assembly and Senate. And they certainly control the Governor. Gavin Newsom’s 2022 reelection account has over $19 million, with primary funding from unions, associations, and major corporations with registered lobbyists. Several of these benefactors were around the table at his infamous French Laundry dinner. In fact, the lobbyist being feted that night apparently used his influence to help secure an exemption from Newsom’s lockdowns for Hollywood. This is why Newsom’s one-man rule has worked out so well for Special Interests.

But it’s the same for legislators. The Chair of the Assembly Appropriations Committee raised around $1 million this last election, and just about all of it came from Special Interests. Exactly nine contributions came from actual people; not a single contribution was under $100. Every legislator gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Third House. It’s easy money, and all other funding pales in comparison. But if you cross the biggest players, they’ll spend millions against you in your next election. So they always get their way at the Capitol. That’s how Sacramento works—and it’s why our state is crumbling. It’s also why I refuse all funding from the Third House and am the only 100 percent citizen-backed legislator.

As Special Interests have taken over the State Capitol, what we’ve lost is our institutions and traditions of self-government—a trend that has also reached a breaking point during the COVID response. While for years the architecture of self-government has been dismantled, brick by brick, in 2020 the entire edifice came crashing down, leaving the people of California trapped in the rubble. For years, local communities have lost ever more power to Sacramento; last year, they lost everything to a single person. For years, public access to policymaking has diminished; last year, it disappeared altogether. For years, state bureaucracies have grown larger and more controlling; last year, they all but took over our lives.

The Recall is thus about something more fundamental than placing a new occupant in the Governor’s office. It’s about repudiating everything the current occupant stands for. That means restoring government by the people, so Californians are no longer subjects of state power but once again authors of our own political destiny. It means repairing our broken political institutions, so they are capable of reversing our state’s decline and saving the California Dream before it’s too late.

This kind of fundamental change requires an extraordinary act of popular sovereignty—an emphatic rejection of the status quo by the people of California. That’s the only remedy for the corruption at the core of our politics. It’s what Bruce Ackerman, in his work We the People, refers to as “higher lawmaking,” where citizens take action “with a seriousness that they do not normally accord to politics.” What results is a kind of “supreme law in the name of the People.” Because such acts of higher lawmaking only come from a highly engaged public, they can have lasting significance, setting the terms and defining the political realities for years or even generations to come.

At this moment, the California public has never been more attentive to and dissatisfied with our state government. That creates an opportunity for a transformational act of popular sovereignty. Such a political disruption coming directly from the people could redound far into the future, reshuffling the stacked deck of our political system. And a recall election is well-suited to this form of higher lawmaking: by its nature, it is a clean yes-or-no referendum on the status quo. In fact, the recall procedure was added to the State Constitution in 1911 as a tool to “unlock the special interest grip” on state politics. For a state in need of a fundamental course correction, a recall is the ideal vehicle.

But even a successful recall doesn’t bring fundamental change automatically. The reason the Gray Davis Recall failed to fundamentally change our politics is because it was not driven by the fundamental failures of our politics. It was simply about an uncompelling politician who was doing his job poorly. He was replaced by a much more compelling politician, but it was merely a personnel change; it did not shift the tectonic plates of our political system.

In the same vein, opposing Gavin Newsom for reelection in 2022 would not be the same as a recall. For one thing, Newsom would have another two years to abuse the public trust and hasten our state’s decline. For another, in a normal election Special Interests are more adapted to blocking change; indeed, every California governor since 1942 has won a new term. But finally, even a Newsom defeat would signal an ordinary transfer of political power, not the extraordinary act of popular sovereignty that this moment demands.

A Last Resort

A recall is not a remedy I turn to lightly. It is far from the first intervention I have pursued. In my speech on March 16, I asked all legislators and all Californians to trust in Governor Newsom’s leadership. In the early days of the crisis, I went out of my way to applaud actions I agreed with and encourage him wherever I could. Even as I implored the Governor to change course in a number of areas, I withheld public criticism as much as possible and was generally supportive.

But as days turned to weeks, it became impossible to hold back criticism consistent with my own responsibilities to the public. There was less and less to applaud, more and more to be alarmed by. The Governor started not merely responding to the public health emergency but ruling the state by decree in ways unrelated to any pandemic. In early May, Assemblyman Gallagher and I tried to engage the Governor in a dialogue about the scope of his emergency powers. His response was to deputize his Legislative Affairs Secretary to falsely accuse us of trying to “to prematurely declare an end to this ongoing crisis that has killed nearly 100,000 Americans.” He has repeatedly resorted to these kinds of demagogic statements, all the while falsely claiming that a State of Emergency turns California into an autocracy until he says otherwise.

Since Newsom refused to cooperate or acknowledge any limits on his powers, we took him to court. After we defeated him once, I publicly proposed conditions for “a more constructive and cooperative relationship” between our two branches of government, which included the Governor involving the Legislature in the enactment of further Executive Orders and acknowledging that there were limits to his emergency powers. Instead of engaging with this proposal, he had the judge who ruled against him removed from our case. After we defeated him again at the trial, his response was to rush to the Court of Appeal to seek an “extraordinary writ.”

As another example, before the Governor issued his school closure order in July, I strongly urged him to follow the science and let schools stay open. Just days earlier that had been his position, too. But then his top campaign benefactor weighed in and Newsom did a 180, ignoring my advice and ordering almost all schools in the state closed. I have since highlighted every new piece of evidence showing that keeping schools open is the right thing for students and the right thing for public health. Yet to this day, Newsom is keeping millions of kids out of school against the overwhelming advice of public health authorities, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Similarly, Newsom has for months ignored our calls to take a more science-based approach to the virus, and California now leads the nation in new cases. Newsom also refused to address the concerns of dozens of lawmakers about mismanagement at the Employment Development Department, leaving millions of Californians without timely unemployment benefits. Most dishonorably, after I presented him with hundreds of testimonials from people unable to work because of the double whammy of AB 5 and the lockdown orders—including nurses and other healthcare professionals—the Governor not only ignored the cries for help of these desperate Californians but spent millions enforcing the law against them.

It is not just me Newsom has ignored. He has dismissed the entire Legislature. From nearly the beginning, lawmakers in both parties have publicly criticized the Governor for announcing major decisions on television shows without consulting with the Legislature or even informing us beforehand. Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), Chair of the Joint Budget Committee, said, “The Legislature has repeatedly called for the Executive Branch to collaborate on COVID-19 response. But time and again, the Legislature has been put in the position of simply giving a yes or no answer to the Governor’s priorities.” Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) decried the Governor’s “huge overreach of authority” and “disdain to properly communicate with the Legislature,” observing that “the governor does not have complete authority to do whatever he wants.”

Even prior supporters of the Governor have been alarmed by his refusal to change his ways. In August, the California Opinion Editor for The Sacramento Bee, a paper that endorsed Newsom, wrote, “There’s no way to undo the failure, confusion and death of the last few months. But if Newsom can stop thinking like a politician and start acting like a leader, there may be some hope for California yet.” By November, The Bee’s Editorial Board did not see improvement: “Two years into his first term, and nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Newsom still can’t get his act together. If Newsom can’t get his head into the game, perhaps he should make this governor thing a one-term affair and leave the job open for someone with a desire to lead.”

Many of us have tried, in every way possible, to get the Governor to change his self-promotional, lawless, corrupt, unscientific, partisan, incompetent, hypocritical, neglectful COVID-19 response. Yet for 10 months, he has refused, causing grievous and lasting damage to our state.

* * *

If we are to have a true recovery, not only from the nightmare of this past year but from decades of decay, it must rest on a foundation of honesty and decency. That means eschewing partisanship, bringing people together, and returning power to local communities. It means, above all, trusting and respecting the people of California.

The specific policies for a post-Newsom era are not the subject of this book. But Part III touches on the fundamental changes needed to respond to the underlying reasons for the Recall—the institutional repair that will allow us to restore checks and balances, revive self-government, root out corruption, and resume the basic functions of good government.

This past year has brought unimaginable hardship. But the months ahead can produce an epochal moment in our state’s history. While a recall is an inherently confrontational event, by breaking free of the nation’s most divisive governor, I believe we can come together again as a state. California can once again start leading the nation in the right ways and reclaim what we’ve always stood for: opportunity, innovation, derring-do, and the singular power of a free people to make tomorrow better than today.

* * *

End of Sample

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