Gov. Newsom’s payback: Move over, Gramps, he tells Biden, says president’s ‘world is gone’

After President Joe Biden made it politically impossible for Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto the bill he signed on Wednesday, which will make it easier for farmworkers to organize, Politico reported that Newsom was “privately seething.”

Private no more, that seething came through clearly in the governor’s passive-aggressive payback this week. Because takedowns of one’s own teammates must be delivered with a smile, and preferably even in the form of a compliment, Newsom said that the president is, alas, “hardwired for a different world” and is someone whose “world is gone.”

In other words, move over, Gramps, and watch how we who are alive today get it done.

Since it was Biden who just forced Newsom to do the right thing, not through back-channel persuasion but in a well organized, frontal power play, I’d say Poor Old Joe understands more about this world than Newsom wants to admit. The phrase “politics ain’t beanbag,” which means hello, it’s a contact sport and always has been, dates back to 1895.

Political messages are typically communicated in cliché. And all of my professional life, Democrats have been warning one another not to “bring a knife to a gunfight.”

Yet Newsom makes it sound like Biden, the dear doddering man, is too stuck in a kinder past to realize that, as noted loudmouth Leo Durocher, who was then managing the Brooklyn Dodgers, said way back in 1946, “Nice guys finish last.”

“It’s very hard for him,” Newsom told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, pretending to be sad. “His decency, his honor, his character, his moral persuasion … those are tools in his toolkit.” Newsom said that Biden “wants to compromise, he wants to find our better angels, and he wants to find that sweet spot in terms of answering our collective vision and values, but that’s not how the system is designed.”

Since 79-year-old Biden was apparently there when the system was designed, he may not need to hear this news bulletin from 54-year-old Newsom.

The governor is speaking to the frustration of Democrats who thought Biden should have used the f-word, fascism, long before he did.

But since Biden is now speaking plainly about the current threats to our democracy, what practical value could there be to Democrats in saying that the president’s “world is gone”? None that I can see.

Though it’s ageist and unhelpful to his party to reinforce the GOP view of Joe Biden as belonging to another time, it may prove helpful to the politically ambitious Gavin Newsom.

Where has “when they go low, we go high” ever gotten anybody, the governor seemed to be asking. Of course, that’s now the dominant view on all sides of the aisle, even if Newsom suggested that his late mother wouldn’t agree.

She would have advised him to just keep modeling better behavior and hope the other guys followed his example, Newsom said. Sorry/not sorry, mom: “We’ve been doing that, and people are losing their rights. We’ve got to hold them accountable.”

Maybe Newsom thinks he’s holding Biden accountable by saying these things. But to me, it just came across as getting even.

This story was originally published September 29, 2022 at 3:02 PM.