Justice & Law Quote by Gray Davis

Gray Davis is doing what embattled politicians do best: shifting the spotlight from the blaze to the wiring. By calling the 1996 law "flawed", he offers a measured concession that sounds candid while staying strategically non-confessional. The word choice matters. "Flawed" suggests a technical misdesign, not negligence or complicity. It’s the language of policy postmortems, not moral reckoning.

The real move is in the split-screen he draws between wholesale and retail markets. Davis frames the crisis as a structural mismatch: utilities were forced to buy power at floating, deregulated wholesale prices while being required to sell it at capped retail rates. That imbalance becomes the villain. It’s an explanation that reads like arithmetic, not ideology, which is precisely why it works: numbers feel apolitical even when they’re doing political work.

Context sharpens the intent. Davis governed California during the electricity crisis and the recall that ultimately ended his tenure. This quote is less a lesson in market design than an argument about causation and blame. It pushes responsibility upstream, toward lawmakers, regulators, and the abstract machinery of "deregulation", while implicitly minimizing executive agency: if the system was rigged to fail, what could any governor do?

Subtextually, it’s also a rebuke to deregulatory optimism without fully repudiating it. He doesn’t say deregulation was wrong; he says it was incomplete. That’s a politician’s scalpel: criticize the implementation, keep distance from the broader economic faith that produced it, and look pragmatic rather than partisan.