Leadership Quote by Gray Davis

The sentence reads like a technician’s post-mortem, but it’s really a political self-defense mechanism disguised as policy critique. Gray Davis isn’t just diagnosing deregulation; he’s carving out a narrow lane of culpability during the California electricity crisis, when blackouts and price spikes turned “the market” into a public villain. The key move is the phrase “flawed in that,” which frames disaster as design error rather than governance failure. It suggests an engineer’s miscalculation, not a leader’s misjudgment.

“First claim on the power plants” is the tell. He’s talking about who gets priority access to generation - who can buy electricity first, at what price, under what rules. In a deregulated system that still forces utilities to buy power on volatile spot markets while freezing retail rates, control of supply becomes leverage, and leverage becomes extortion. Davis’s subtext: California was made to play poker without chips, while generators and traders could name their price.

The second line - “It deregulated part of the market, but not all of the market” - is a tidy indictment of half-measures, and a subtle rebuke of the ideology that markets self-correct. Partial deregulation is presented as the worst of both worlds: enough “competition” to invite gaming, not enough structure to prevent it. Politically, it’s also a way to distribute blame outward: the architecture was broken before he touched it. The rhetorical power here is its flatness. No soaring language, just the calm insistence that the crisis wasn’t mysterious - it was engineered by policy.