Leadership Quote by Gray Davis

“Two bites of the apple” is the kind of plainspoken idiom politicians reach for when the policy details are ugly and the public mood is uglier. Gray Davis is talking like a consumer advocate, not a regulator: the sentence is built to sound like common sense, a kitchen-table fairness test applied to a byzantine energy market. That’s the point. During California’s early-2000s electricity crisis, “credit penalty” and “utilities” were abstractions to most people; “you’re not going to get” is a shove. He turns a technical dispute over contracts, risk, and pricing into a moral offense: double-dipping.

The specific intent is to draw a bright line for energy sellers and signal toughness to voters watching blackouts and price spikes. Davis frames the companies’ behavior as already extracting a punishment from utilities, then trying to make taxpayers swallow another. The repetition of “penalty” matters: it recasts what companies might call “market pricing” or “risk premium” as an unjust fine. He’s not negotiating terms; he’s defining the story.

Subtext: the governor is trying to reclaim authority in a market that had slipped out of the state’s hands. By accusing companies of taking “two bites,” he implies bad faith and opportunism without needing to prove outright fraud. It’s courtroom rhetoric aimed at a TV audience: simple, memorable, accusatory. The line also hints at Davis’s political bind: he must look like he’s fighting powerful interests while managing the state’s complicity in deregulation’s design flaws.