Gavin Newsom goes back to his moderate roots in new memoir
Gov. Gavin Newsom ran as a liberal challenger to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, his main Democratic opponent in the race for governor in 2018, championing single-payer health care, more housing production and suspending the death penalty.
It was a marked departure from his time as a city supervisor, and later mayor of San Francisco, where he was considered the representative for his hometown’s political and business elite classes. And now, with his time in office coming to an end, that side is reemerging in his latest media venture set to drop Tuesday.
“Leadership is measured by results — and Gavin Newsom’s mayoral administration was universally pro-labor, pro-consumer, pro-teacher and pro-environment and achieved the highest minimum wage, the most generous worker and renter protections and the only citywide universal health care plan in the nation – to say nothing of igniting a national movement for marriage equality,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Click told The Sacramento Bee at the time.
Eight years later, on the cusp of his exit from state office after two terms, Newsom is playing up his political roots as a moderate Democratic businessman in his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” which Penguin Press publishes Tuesday. The title of the 277-page book, which he wrote with journalist Mark Arax, is cribbed from a 2009 Economist profile.
Newsom, who is termed out of office and cannot run again in November, has been circumspect about his plans for life after 2026. After saying he would make his decision after the November midterms, he told CNN on Sunday that any decision about running for president in 2028 “would be made as a family” with his four children and wife, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
Through mid-March, he is embarking on a national tour, promoting the memoir in battleground states like South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Tennessee, as well as liberal enclaves like Los Angeles, New York, and his hometown of San Francisco.
At the first stop on Saturday in Nashville, he called the book “the opposite” of a political memoir, “because so many political memoirs for politicians that are in office are sanitized,” according to a recording of his remarks at the tour stop.
“They’re organized in a way to make you feel like you know they understand you,” Newsom said. “They’re everything and often nothing. And so this (my book) is messy.”
The purpose of a memoir is to introduce a potential presidential candidate to a wider, national audience, according to Dan Schnur, a political communications professor at UC Berkeley and USC.
“Writing a book has become a rite of passage for any aspiring presidential candidate. It used to be candidates just declared they were running. Then it was, ‘I’m exploring the possibility,’” Schnur said. “Before you can get people interested in your political biography, it helps to know about your personal biography.”
‘Affirmative action pick’
“Young Man in a Hurry” starts with Newsom’s great-great-grandfather emigrating from Ireland to San Francisco, and ends when he was first elected governor in late 2018.
He delves into the brief marriage between his parents, Judge William Newsom III and Tessa Menzies, and its impact on his latchkey childhood with sister Hillary; his first foray into business with backing from the Getty family; his time in local politics as a Willie Brown appointee, city supervisor, and San Francisco mayor; and the collapse of his first marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who President Donald Trump appointed ambassador to Greece, and later remarriage to Siebel Newsom.
Brown appointed Newsom president of the San Francisco Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996. Six months later, Brown appointed him to the city Board of Supervisors in 1997, at John Burton’s urging, after Kevin Shelley stepped down to join the Assembly. Brown joked that as the board’s “sole heterosexual Caucasian with a Y chromosome,” the Irish-Catholic Newsom was his “affirmative action pick.”
“My selection was seen by some in the community as a throwback to the days when white male businessmen didn’t even have to pretend to share power in the city,” the governor wrote of his pick to represent the city’s 2nd District, which includes the Marina, Cow Hollow, Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff neighborhoods. “My moderation reflected the people I would end up representing…which boasted the city’s strongest concentration of Republicans and, not surprisingly, its highest income levels.”
As city supervisor, Newsom bucked his left-leaning colleagues by championing initiatives like Proposition N, known as “Care Not Cash,” which applied parts of homeless people’s assistance checks to their housing and mental and drug treatment.
“Proposition N passed in 2002 with 60% of the vote, burnishing my credentials for a run at higher office and bringing home the lesson that it was better to be aligned with the people than with the pundits,” Newsom wrote.
Former city supervisor Aaron Peskin, a progressive and frequent Newsom critic, called Care Not Cash a “political calculation.” He said he never relied on Newsom to provide a crucial sixth vote to get a majority to pass any legislation on the 11-member board but could not immediately recall any specific incidents.
State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who served on the board at the time, also opposed Care Not Cash at the time and brokered a compromise.
“He (Newsom) wasn’t interested in solving the problem (of homelessness), he was interested in scoring political points,” Peskin said of Care Not Cash. “It could’ve passed at the board. I even said I’d vote for it.”
Peskin said Brown called him Monday to facetiously ask what Peskin thought of Newsom’s telling the Nashville audience, “I’m just like you,” about his low SAT score and academic struggles.
The comment earned Newsom flak online and from former Ohio Sen. Nina Turner and Sen. Tim Scott, a Black Republican from South Carolina, who said “Black Americans aren’t your low bar.”
‘Mayor McHottie’ and the Winter of Love
Dubbed “Dapper Dan” and “Mayor McHottie” by local press, Newsom later won the 2003 mayoral election by six points over the Green Party candidate, Mark “the Socialist Stud” Gonzalez. Newsom’s campaign emphasized Care Not Cash and outspent Gonzalez by a 10-1 margin, with backing from the Gettys and the business community.
As mayor, he later successfully pushed voters to pass a “sit/lie” ordinance in 2010 that banned people from sitting or lying on city sidewalks between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.
“Twenty-five years later, breaking news: San Francisco still has a homeless crisis,” Peskin said. “It’s fine. I’d still probably take him over the other guy (Trump).”
In the book, Newsom attributes the ongoing homeless crisis to the “economic dislocations” of the Great Recession, surging income inequality, a housing shortage, increasing rents and mortgages, and drug and alcohol abuse.
“But for every hundred who found their way to stable housing, a new contingent of sixty, seventy, or eighty found their way onto the streets,” he wrote. “Sadly, the stressors would only grow worse.”
‘Just so dull’
Less than two months after his successful mayoral election, Newsom presided over the 2004 “Winter of Love,” encouraging LGBT couples to get married ahead of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.
His staff members, some of whom were LGBT themselves, were split on whether the new mayor should publicly champion gay marriage, which only 1 in 3 Californians supported at the time.
“The ‘go it slow’ admonition was the mother’s milk of Democratic politics,” Newsom wrote. “But this was San Francisco, and we were talking about equal protection under the law for a class of people whose ostracism by family, friends and community had brought them to San Francisco in the first place. If not here, where?”
After a short-lived gubernatorial campaign in 2009, Newsom moved to Sacramento as lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a position he called officially the state’s second most powerful position.
“In actuality, it was a backwater where the only time you emerged from your burrow was when the governor flew off to another country,” he wrote.
Newsom famously bemoaned Sacramento as “just so dull” and bided his time by hosting a short-lived talk show, writing a book about improving government efficiency, and taking advantage of his brief stints as acting governor to declare the avocado the state fruit.
His chaotic tenure as governor received the most attention in the book’s prologue, beginning with the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest inferno in state history, and after that, COVID, a recall election and Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
“My time in office has been altered by twenty-first-century pandemic and climate change, by drought and wildfire and the rise of authoritarian forces whose contempt for democracy is its own flame,” Newsom wrote. “I struggle at times to make sense of the challenge of governance before me, in part because it is a challenge that has few precedents in history and in part because the means to meet it are not always within my grasp.”
