Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.
I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.
I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country.'
Running for office is similar to being a trial lawyer in a very long trial. It requires adrenaline and stamina; it requires being in shape mentally and emotionally. It's a marathon.
With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.
I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else's shoes, and identify and reject false choices.
We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.
Anti-Semitism is real in this country.
We're talking about in the Proposition 8 case fundamental rights, civil rights. I offer no apology for the position I took in Prop. 8.
What we know is smartphones are everywhere and they are rich in data. What we know is that there are apps once downloaded by the consumer that will also in turn download the consumers' contact book. Most consumers don't want that to happen and don't know it's happening.
And so I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.
My mother had a saying: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'
The bells will ring and the marriages will begin. And it's a great day in our state for equal protection under the law for all people.
My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.
My mother came from India to go to the University of California, Berkeley.
I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.
I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.
I think I have every piece of music Bob Marley ever made.
I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.
These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don't know who is calling that child.
