Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. We're joined today by Lonnie Chen, who is running

for Controller of California. He has worked in a number of senior policy positions for Republican

presidential candidates. Mitt Romney's chief policy advisor in 2012, Marco Rubio's policy team

in 2016. Mitt Romney in 2008, Bush Cheney in 2004, a long list of senior policy positions in

Republican presidential politics. He's also the Diane and David Steffi fellow in American

public policy studies at the Hoover Institution and Director of Domestic Policy Studies and

Lecture in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University. He's on leave from Stanford now,

while he runs as a Republican statewide in California. In our conversation, we talk about his

run for Controller, whether it's a suicide mission, what the Controller actually does on a day-to-day

basis in the general state of fiscal health in the state of California. Lonnie, thanks for joining us.

Great to be with you. Thank you. I think we first met when you were Mitt Romney's policy director

back in 2012. I always wanted to ask you this question, what did you do all day, every day,

as policy director? What would it take for somebody on the campaign to say,

shit, get Lonnie? It's one of those things where now that I look back on it many years after,

it was a little cliche to say at the time that there were no two days that were the same, but I

really think that that was the case. Really, the job of policy director is more than anything

you're a process manager, which doesn't sound very glamorous and it's some measure of it,

isn't, but actually what I've reflected on is that a lot of great jobs in government and politics

are really process jobs. They're making sure that you are furnishing your principal and your

colleagues on the campaign with really the information they need to make informed decisions. When

it came to being policy director, yes, I was the chief policy advisor in the sense that,

you know, oftentimes, I'd probably be the last person to give Governor Romney to give Mitt sort of

...