I am a public-interest attorney and a recent transplant (by way of the
Bay Area and San Diego) to Santa Monica.  As a lifelong Democrat and
progressive, I ask for your support.

In the coming years, the Democratic Party can create extraordinary
change in the Californian polity: we can renew our commitment to our
most fundamental civil liberties; craft policies, build physical
infrastructure, and create green jobs for long-term environmental
sustainability; reform public financing; expand access to healthcare
and educational opportunities; fix our utterly broken prison system;
and commit ourselves to clean and transparent elections.

We can also guard against repeating the mistakes of recent years:
deregulation at the expense of common sense; unilateral and
heavy-handed foreign policy; and an unwillingness to acknowledge, much
less remedy, increasing economic stratification.

In his famous speech at the University of Capetown, Robert F. Kennedy
said, "It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that
human history is shaped."  More than forty years later, at this
critical moment, the Democratic Party has the ability to demand such
acts from our government and nurture them in our citizens.  We should
seize the moment.

I hope to be a part of these changes and this moment.  While I was in
law school at Stanford, I worked on a variety of human rights, civil
liberties, and foreign policy cases and issues.  The most notable of
these cases, Padilla v. Rumsfeld, traversed all three of these areas.
My practice now focuses on election, education, and public policy
matters, and I am passionate about my professional work in support of
various progressive causes and candidates.  I was also a volunteer
attorney with Barack Obama's election campaign; in fact, our firm
served as California counsel for Obama.

I am committed to the progressive vision of the Democratic Party and
would consider it an honor to serve as a delegate from the 41st
Assembly District.