Top Democrats took a stand on Los Angeles City Council racism. Why didn’t Gavin Newsom?

Gavin Newsom presumably has highly qualified and compensated people to tell him how to win what he insists is most certainly not a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. But helping the current Democratic president look more courageous, egalitarian and, well, Democratic on his own turf doesn’t seem like a bulletproof strategy.

And yet that’s what the governor did by going AWOL on the scandal preoccupying much of his state for most of the past month: the leaked recording of three Los Angeles City Council members discussing redistricting, their colleagues and their community in crassly racist terms. While crowds of Angelenos and local, state and national officeholders rightly called for the trio to resign based on their documented disparagement of whole swaths of the public they represent, Newsom settled for the milquetoast observation that “racist language can do real harm.” He even congratulated the offenders for having apologized and “begun to take responsibility.”

The recording’s unwitting star, Nury Martinez, caught disparaging a fellow council member’s Black child and the city’s entire Oaxacan community, resigned days after the audio surfaced. So did local labor leader Ron Herrera, another participant. But the two other council members implicated, Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, remain defiantly and disturbingly in power.

Newsom’s abdication left a metropolis-sized opening for some other prominent Democratic executive to play the mensch and say what had to be said about the people who should no longer run California’s largest city.

“He believes that they all should resign,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of President Joe Biden shortly after the audio was published, calling the council members’ remarks “unacceptable” and “appalling.” “They should all step down.”

Jean-Pierre went on to note that Biden’s statement was an example of an important “difference between Democrats and MAGA Republicans: When a Democrat says something racist or anti-Semitic ... we hold Democrats accountable.”

That is to say, Biden was being a Democrat in the best sense of the word, and Newsom ... wasn’t.

It was the second time in as many months that Biden could credibly claim as much. Last month, the president urged a reluctant Newsom to sign a bill to facilitate union organization of farmworkers. He thereby seized the high ground on economic as well as racial equality, supposedly core Democratic values that Newsom apparently regards as marginal.

No wonder the governor went walkabout for the duration of the president’s recent California swing, which came soon after the White House’s admirably unequivocal stand on the Southern California scandal.

Newsom has lately taken it upon himself to critique his own party as insufficiently vigorous while none too subtly suggesting that Biden is old and out of touch. And yet the president keeps taking the positions the governor should have taken, making himself look more boldly and decisively progressive than his self-appointed critic.

Signing the farmworker bill, which Newsom eventually did under immense pressure and after extensive hemming and hawing, required the governor to reverse his previous stance and meaningfully advance labor rights at the expense of his fellow agribusiness moguls, none of which could have been easy for him. His more recent failure to take a strong stand against racism — one with few tangible repercussions and no conceivable counterpoint — is even harder to defend.

Biden was right about the council members, after all, but he was far from alone. The leaked recording was so grotesque that the council was unable to meet in person over all the yelling for the culprits’ heads. Among those quickly joining the crowd in calling for resignations were the California Democratic Party and several of its top officials, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Board of Equalization chair and controller candidate Malia Cohen. Attorney General Rob Bonta went so far as to open an investigation into the redistricting process at the center of the inflammatory discussion.

Nor did U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla’s local ties as a former Los Angeles City Council president prevent him from issuing a categorical condemnation of his successors. The senator called on all three members involved to “resign and take full responsibility.”

“I am appalled at the racist, dehumanizing remarks made by Los Angeles city officials and leaders,” he said.

Even Newsom seemed to acknowledge the participants’ glaring unfitness for public office — though only when it no longer mattered. After Martinez resigned, he issued a statement calling it the “right move” while remaining silent as to her interlocutors.

One of them, de León, a former state Senate leader and U.S. Senate candidate, had the temerity Wednesday to insist that despite his enthusiastic participation in the conversation and the racist disparagement of a colleague’s child, he will remain in office. He does so with the tacit assent of the governor.