Orange County Democrats gave Gavin Newsom a rousing welcome at an awards dinner last weekend, but he didn’t fare as well with OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley, who called out the Lite Gov and Current TV host for artfully lifting lines from a Thomas Friedman book:
"In 2005, Facebook is not there," Newsom noted about the contents of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s book That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind In the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. "Twitter in 2005 was a sound. Clouds were in the sky. Apps were things you filled out to get into college. Linkedin was a prison; 4G was a parking space, and Skype, for most of us, was a typo."
The list produced the expected audience delight. In fact, those were Newsom's best lines. Too bad they weren't his. He'd swiped the points—changing only a word or two—from Friedman, who spoke them during a Sept. 6, 2011, National Public Radio interview on All Things Considered.
Moxley called the performance “lackluster,” and says several attendees “told me they’ve heard Newsom give the same speech several times.”
