Lewis A. Fein
Why We Come Here: A Republican Response
newsandopinion.com | Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon will face California's Governor Gray Davis this November. Davis will certainly attack Simon's conservatism and views about abortion, hoping to further polarize the state's electorate. Here is the speech Simon should deliver to all California voters:
This campaign will be long, expensive, possibly negative and almost always formidable. After all, incumbent politicians do not easily - or willingly - relinquish power. And, as this campaign intensifies, Gray Davis will deny his record and distort mine. He will talk about choice, but ignore opportunities.
Folks, let Gray Davis talk about choice all he wants. My campaign - indeed, my administration - will be about real choices. Choices for middle class families overwhelmed by excessive taxes. Choices for immigrants, people relegated to inferior schools and violent neighborhoods. Choices for minorities with too few opportunities. Choices for citizens that, regardless of their race, sex or language, represent the Golden State.
So, let me be clear: Gray Davis can only win if he destroys me. He can only win if he denies what voters already know - that this great state is ill, because of lights too expensive to turn on and schools too embarrassingly bad to close.
This great state is ill, not because we speak with different accents or worship before different churches. This great state is ill, because the very thing that unites us - the desire to live freely and prosper - is something Gray Davis does not understand.
Where I hear Spanish words or Korean expressions or Yiddish declarations, Gray Davis hears division. Division based on fear, and division premised upon the idea that what is different is dangerous and what is similar is boring.
Yet, we all come here for the same reason: freedom. We come from Mexico, having heard illustrious promises and paid impossible prices. We come from China, having bid farewell to communist slavery and moral decay. We come from all over America, having followed the western sun's golden light - where reinvention, the hope of a better tomorrow, is the promise of California.
In a way, we come from the land already here. From the farmland's rich soil, tilled by Mexican heroes - humble men and spiritual women, people with hands that ache and thumbs that bleed. People that work honestly and pray earnestly. People that, in the midst of pain and awful poverty, recite the rosary's fifteen promises.
We come from the tracks of great locomotives. We come from the wood, iron and steel of Asian labor. We come from Chinatown, Koreatown and Little Tokyo.
We come from hardworking neighborhoods. We come from places with genuine problems. We come from towns with unstable jobs and unsuccessful schools. We come from places Gray Davis talks about but never visits.
We come from places that more spending will not help. We come from places that more taxes will not fix. Folks, we come from the real world - a place Gray Davis hardly knows, and one he will return to this November.
We come to California for what it must offer: conditions that foster success. Yet, we cannot succeed with taxes that are too high and regulations that are too many. We also cannot educate children in two languages, while they cannot successfully speak either. Nor can we police our streets with laws that do not work and jails that improperly operate.
Folks, this great state cannot be golden with grayness. This great state cannot be better with bigger government. This great state cannot succeed by having achieved failure.
This great state will be better - for all Californians, of all backgrounds and beliefs - when we act wisely this November. This great state will have its power back and its schools working.
This great state will be important again. This great state is the reason we come here.
newsandopinion.com |
