Be Invenitos, that's California for welcome to this very special year in review,

edition of National Reviews, Radio Free California Podcast.

I'm Will Swain, president of the California Policy Center. You can find my colleagues and me at California Policy Center.org. You can find my friend and co-host David Bonson right here. He's an economist, the host of the Capitol Record podcast. He's author of a book, full-time work in the meaning of life. And of course, he's founder of the eponymous investment from the Bonson Group. Hello, David. Hello, Will. Are you ready for your holiday? I am absolutely ready. I have done no shopping and lots of work, including on this really special episode, David. We are here, of course, to do our year and review episode. We do this every year. How weird. And there's just, this was like two years, David, this past year. It was really weird. And it begins, I think, it's fair to say, I'm not going to hide the ball here. I was just explaining to you offline here that the year can really be divided up into two pieces. Trump wins the first six months for reasons

we can dig into, and then Newsom just kicks butt in the second six months. And I think he takes

the crown. Newsom does his kind of Time Magazine man of the year. You don't have to like him,

you don't have to love him. I think it's just pretty clear that Newsom did a very, very,

an amazingly expert political job this year.

Now, again, you and I are always stipulating. We're not congratulating him as a good governor.

I think he's terrible. But the fact is he's a tremendous politician as this year bears out.

And even when he's been mistake prone, he generally corrects pretty quickly.

Yes, he does.

Yeah, I'm thinking of French laundry, which was, you know, should have blown him out of office,

almost did.

There was a recall.

Nothing happened.

That was, of course, 2021, I think.

Although in that case, he got a pretty big assist from us.

The right to choosing to follow up the French laundry with the

recall thing. Yes, big mistake.

Gave him a big path to redemption. But yeah, he does seem to have a lot of lives.

And so 26, his final year as governor, and certainly a year in which he will be working

as governor, but really basically

...