. . . or does he?
. . . or does he?
G avin Newsom will not run for president in 2024. That’s the bold declaration of the California governor himself, as told in uncountable media reports, each of them born of Newsom’s single conversation with Politico’s Jonathan Martin on Election Night in Sacramento.
“I’ve told everyone in the White House, from the chief of staff to the first lady,” the governor reportedly told Martin.
More dramatically, in the same November 26 story, Martin reports that just a short time after their conversation, after the governor declared victory in his third successful run for governor (including a 2021 recall win), after he departed the “now-ceremonial governor’s mansion,” the governor stopped on the street outside to take a congratulatory call from President Joe Biden himself. It was, Martin recalls, “a chilly-for-California night.” The governor was “speaking on his cell phone and telling the soon-to-be-80-year-old president, worry not, he was on board” for a second Biden term.
“I’m all in. Put me in coach,” Newsom told Biden. “We have your back.”
Newsom’s announcement came as a surprise to observers left and right who’ve watched his recent, frenetic national tour. It sure looks like a trail intended to end inside the Oval Office. He has trolled Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, putative 2024 Republican candidates for president. Flush with campaign cash, he paid for summertime ads warning Floridians that DeSantis hates freedom. He bought newspaper ads in Texas blaming Abbott for gun violence. Newsom publicly dared the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a new California law allowing citizens to sue gunmakers, specifically noting its similarity to a Texas law that allows citizens to sue doctors who perform abortions. He blasted Abbott’s energy policies at a high-profile New York climate conference, and then traveled to Texas and dropped the hammer on DeSantis for his Covid policies.
Newsom has even launched fusillades at his own party. Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs, he asked anyone who would listen, “Where the hell is my party?” That party is, of course, led by Joe Biden, a man who, entering his 80s, may wonder the same thing if for different reasons.
Given all that, are we to believe that Newsom is not running for president in 2024? The answer is likely no.
The governor is theatrical, the sort of man who uses each public tragedy and crime scene (wildfires, mass shootings, homelessness, inflation) and even his own intimate failures (he blamed alcohol for his high-profile extramarital affair) as a chance to distinguish his can-do progressive idealism from Republican perfidy and cynicism.
That February 2007 affair may be instructive. He was mayor of San Francisco then and, as the San Francisco Examiner put it, “plagued by questions regarding the role of alcohol in his life” following his admission that he was “having an affair with a former staffer, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of longtime aide and former campaign manager Alex Tourk.”
“I will be a better person without alcohol in my life,” Newsom told the world, and then he reportedly (per multiple media accounts, including the Examiner’s) “entered an outpatient program at Delancey Street Foundation — a nationally recognized San Francisco organization that serves substance abusers and former felons.”
At the time, Newsom was emphatic that alcohol “was not an excuse for ‘my personal lapses in judgment.’” But it sure seems like one now.
That’s because, while running for governor in 2018, the rehab story was suddenly a liability. So Newsom issued denials. “No, there’s no rehab,” he told the Sacramento Bee editorial board. “I just stopped. There was no treatment, no nothing related to any of that stuff. I stopped because I thought it was a good thing to stop.”
Because this is Gavin Newsom, the evolving story didn’t stop there. Just a few weeks ago, Jennifer Siebel Newsom — Newsom’s girlfriend at the time of the affair, now his wife and “first partner” — testified in the trial of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Under defense questioning, she admitted that, having accused Weinstein of raping her in 2005, she contacted him to ask for advice. How, she asked Weinstein in an email discovered by the defense, should Newsom manage his high-profile sex scandal?
How about ducking into the sacred, anonymous space of rehab?
So, you’ll understand that Newsom’s apparently solid denial of any interest in the White House is, for many, a little less solid than the multi-tentacled media’s reports (all of them linked to Politico’s Martin) might suggest. It’s like a liquid, or maybe more like a gas, and just as hard to grasp.
But believe his denial, said Bob Shrum, a University of Southern California political scientist. “He’s absolutely not running.” Then, as if to clarify, he added, “I mean, if Biden’s running, he’s absolutely not running.”
Shrum credits Newsom with CinemaScopic vision. “It would be politically disastrous for him to primary Biden. He’s a realist, and he wants to put himself forward as a national leader well into the future,” Shrum said.
But there’s a caveat. What if Biden doesn’t run? Would Newsom run then?
“He would certainly consider it,” said Shrum, a little less than absolute on the denial.
A longtime Democratic operative close to Newsom agreed. If Biden is running, Newsom isn’t.
“I’m not saying they’re right, but here’s what Democrats all over the country think: They believe that if Trump is the nominee, Biden wins,” said the operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Right or wrong, Dems believe that Biden is our best shot against Donald Trump.”
And if Biden bows out — can’t or won’t run for reelection — those Democrats aren’t likely to be put off by Newsom’s growing catalogue of actual failures. His high-speed rail system? Stalled in the Central Valley. Record spending on schools? Newsom’s obeisance to teachers’ unions has cratered California student-test scores. Homelessness? High and rising despite billions of dollars of new spending. California has the nation’s highest cost of living, highest marginal income-tax rate, and highest gasoline prices. And now, just one year after he boldly pointed to a $100 billion budget surplus as a symbol of his economic-management skills, Newsom’s own state finance department is raising alarms that the surplus has vanished. The national recession and tech catastrophes have already dented California’s legendarily cyclical income-tax revenue, which is tied closely to capital gains.
None of that will matter, the Democratic insider said. In a highly partisan world, competence is less important than the appearance of effort. “Not always getting it right is built into politics these days,” he said. “Poll after poll shows that voters want to know that you’re trying.” And California voters, he said, believe “Newsom is always trying. And that goes a long way.”
“I think in these ideologically extreme times, Newsom isn’t — and need not be — worried about the fact that he is a failed governor,” said Jon Fleischman, a longtime California Republican political strategist and former executive director of the California GOP. “He’ll look to dominate a Dem primary with hard-left positions and a huge head start toward the nomination with the California delegates — especially if he squeezes [Vice President Kamala] Harris all of the way out.”
Mark that: In a partisan world, “trying” — saying you’ll do things — beats actually accomplishing anything. A CalMatters reporter tells the story of Democrat affection for such Newsomian physics. Responding to Newsom’s provocative call for a federal investigation into Abbott’s and DeSantis’s shipping migrants to Democratic communities in the north, Hidalgo County (Texas) Democrat Samuel Reyes said, “We don’t want to make it more ugly, but if we do believe in what we’re saying and we do believe that our message is right, then we do have to get it out there. . . . I personally like that he’s doing that.”
There’s another way to read Martin’s account of Newsom’s election-night confab with the president. That requires close attention to rising concern on the left about Kamala Harris. Legendarily unpopular — not just with progressives but with most Americans — Harris has been the target of a drip campaign by Biden’s allies. Slate recently summed it up this way: “If Biden intends to keep his job, he would do well to join forces with someone who isn’t even less popular than he is.”
Someone like Gavin Newsom? “Put me in, coach.”