Out with the old, in with the Newsom? The Democrats’ young(ish) pretender has his eyes on Biden’s crown
While Joe Biden was in Saudi Arabia, Gavin Newsom, the California governor who looks as if he walked right out of presidential central casting, was stalking the White House.
While Joe Biden was off in Saudi Arabia fist-bumping the crown prince, Gavin Newsom, the slick-haired, gravel-voiced California governor who looks as if he walked right out of presidential central casting, was stalking the halls of the White House.
The 54-year-old travelled to the capital this month ostensibly to accept an award for his education policies. But he didn’t miss the opportunity to spend the afternoon in the West Wing – and get the measure of a building that political watchers reckon he’d like to make his next residence. The Washington Examiner captured the DC view of Newsom’s neatly-timed jaunt: “White House hunting? Newsom visits while Biden is away”.
Like many a politician before him, Newsom sought to diffuse speculation about his ambitions through a thin veil of feigned incredulity. “I’ve tried to say, “no”, “no way”, in every way I possibly can,” he told one of the retinue of reporters his office invited on the trip. “In fact, I may need advice, what’s the language to express, “’Absolutely, no.’”
His words fell on deaf ears. “This is about positioning himself on the national stage,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University. “He’s always someone who’s been framed by ambition.”
Discontent with Biden is surging and so the jockeying to replace him as the Democratic nominee for 2024 has already begun. Newsom has emerged as a leading contender alongside vice president Kamala Harris and transportation secretary Pete Buttigeig, both of whom lost to Biden last time around.
Nearly two-thirds of Democrat voters don’t want the 79-year-old president to run again, according to a June New York Times poll. Concerns centre on Biden’s age – he is already the oldest president in history at 79 – and on his apparent inability to get things done as one signature program after another, including his much-ballyhooed climate change regulation, dies in Congress.
Newsom, the square-jawed up-and-comer a full quarter-century Biden’s junior, has stepped into the void, painting himself as the powerful new voice the centre-left desperately needs. “He’s trying to play the Democrat strong man, to show that Democrats are not weaklings who get sand kicked in their face by Republicans at a time when the Biden White House has been largely feckless,” McCuan said.
Indeed, days before he showed up in Washington, Newsom ran an eye-catching television ad in Florida aimed at Ron DeSantis, the firebrand conservative governor who has been dubbed “Trump with a brain” and is expected to run in 2024 for the Republicans. DeSantis has gained national prominence as a younger, cannier version of the former president with stunts like banning maths books that “indoctrinated” children with “woke” ideologies, and attempting to pass a draconian anti-abortion law that makes no exceptions for incest or rape. In Newsom’s ad, he bashed the Republican for “banning books” and “criminalising women and doctors”, urging Floridians to head west where, “we still believe in freedom.”
The question for Democrats is whether Newsom’s sometimes questionable judgment will end up costing his own side, as it has in previous moments during his climb up the greasy pole. But what nobody doubts is that California’s governor has been preparing for this moment for decades.
Newsom grew up in San Francisco with his mother, Tessa, who separated from his father when he was just 2 years old. Money was tight. Tessa worked multiple jobs to support him and his sister. His father managed the trusts of the Getty family – San Francisco royalty who traced their billions to the oil industry – yet somehow was constantly flirting with bankruptcy.
Newsom was dyslexic and insecure, but also determined never to find himself in his father’s predicament.
In middle school, he took to wearing blazers and suits, inspired by Remington Steele, the suave television con-man played by Pierce Brosnan. “The suit was literally a mask,” he told the New Yorker in 2018. “I am still that anxious kid with the bowl-cut hair, the dyslexic kid-the rest is a facade.”
One of Newsom’s superpowers has been his ability to pull himself into the orbit of the rich and powerful. After university, he went into business with Gordon Getty’s son. They started a wine and spirits company, called Plumpjack, and opened Balboa Cafe, which became a hotspot for the city’s young and wealthy, many of whom would later become his political benefactors.
In 2001 he married Kimberly Guifoyle, a lawyer and aspiring media personality who would go on to become a Fox News talk show host and is now the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr and an outspoken supporter of his father. In 2004, however, she was beside her Democrat husband as he won election for mayor of the most progressive city in America. They divorced two years later, in 2006, but not before the glamorous bicoastal power couple posed for a Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot under a headline that dubbed them the “New Kennedys.”
It was in that era that Newsom picked up the sobriquet ‘Mayor McHottie’. And it was also when he showed a propensity for self-defeating decisions. Not long after divorcing Guilfoyle, he slept with the wife of his friend and campaign manager. The affair scandalised the city. He has since admitted that he drank too much, and later sought counselling for alcohol abuse.
He has since refashioned those dark days into elements of his personal arc; fodder for his political coming-of-age story. He is not the first. As a young person, Newsom taped every one of Bill Clinton speeches and studied them, an apprentice to a distant master. One can still see the elements in his speeches: the pregnant pauses, the biting of the lower lip as he “feels” someone’s pain.
Yet in his rush to reach the mountaintop has often undermined himself. When George W Bush proposed a law in 2004 that would outlaw gay marriage, Newsom responded, instructing the city clerk’s office to sign off on same-sex unions, resulting in thousands of weddings.
Democrat power players urged him against the move, which soon became a rallying cry for Republicans across America. When Bush defeated John Kerry in the 2004 election, Newsom was partially blamed.
In 2009, he announced we would run in the 2011 governor’s race. Again, his advisors told him the move was premature. He didn’t listen, and was beaten comfortably by Jerry Brown, a seasoned veteran of the California political scene. Newsom was left to scrounge for political table scraps. He ran for lieutenant governor, a post he had once dismissed. He spent the next eight years in Brown’s shadow, grasping for relevance while quietly gathering the support of tech billionaires like Netflix’s Reed Hastings and Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive.
When the 2019 race came round, he won handily. He has since used the office to project himself onto the national arena. When the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision to rescind abortion rights last month, Biden derided the decision – “a tragic error” – but did nothing. Newsom flew into action. “Where the hell’s my party?” he bellowed in a speech. “Why aren’t we standing up more firmly? More resolutely?”
The governor signed an executive order to protect women from out-of-state prosecutors who might seek medical records of those travelling to California for abortions. He set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to prepare for an “influx” of women, and proposed an amendment to the state Constitution enshrining a women’s right to choose. The contrast with Biden was stark. And Newsom’s willingness to throw elbows with Republicans has discomfited the GOP. A motley crew of conservatives funded a recall vote last year, hoping to capitalise on outrage from the “French Laundry incident”, when Newsom was photographed dining maskless indoors at a Michelin-star restaurant against the pandemic advice he was sternly handing out to Calfironians.
He saw off the challenge easily.
Yet for all of his bluster, Newsom does not yet have a signature policy win on which to hang his hat. California’s education system ranks in the middle or near the bottom of most meaningful categories. (The award Newsom received this month in Washington was for a spending bill to address those poor results). Despite boasting the world’s fifth largest economy – California ranks just ahead of Britain – Newsom has been utterly incapable of addressing the state’s worsening homelessness crisis. One in five of America’s homeless population resides in California.
One can imagine the opposition ads. All a political rival would need to do is take a camera crew to Skid Row in Los Angeles, or the tent encampments in San Francisco’s tenderloin district and, McCuan wanted, “The images write their own TV commercial. ‘Don’t let happen to America, what happened in California’”.
Newwsom might do well to wait, to give his policies time to produce results, results that would then serve as the basis for a platform. But then, waiting was never Newsom’s strong suit.
The Times
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