Gavin Newsom’s Young Man in a Hurry: “One of the Boys” Politics

Brand Management 101: If you were a status hound who has observed two (remarkably unappealing, it must be said) women and one octogenarian blow your party’s chances against a (remarkably unappealing, it must be said) septuagenarian, and you were to write a memoir, wouldn’t you work the phrase “young man” into its title? Gavin Newsom is 58: not exactly young, but, as the physicist said after he took a paternity test, it’s all relative. A memoir by a non-retiring elected official has two principal functions: to increase that official’s name recognition in advance of the next campaign, and to adorn with its insubstantial spine the shelves of Airbnb rentals. Check and check? No. Newsom wants more. Young Man in a Hurry is a sorry attempt to invite young men back into a party that has done its best to excommunicate young men.

California’s governor was once lanky and introverted and dyslexic and diligent. A few of these he still is. He had a distant, though in no sense absent, father, who studied French literature and settled for law, and who was never very good with money but always around a great deal of it. Young Gavin was bullied: “Hey, Newscum, you seem in a hurry.” (Schoolkids in the late ’70s came up with that put-down, you hear?) He was, he is, an obsessive perfectionist. Grandma Jean in the ’30s “thumbed her nose at the Red Scare and took a flight to Soviet Russia,” where she stayed for three years. She gave him colored pencils and taught him to “draw beyond the linear”; to see beauty in his mistakes. Useful for a career in central planning. He saw Rocky and purged his piggy bank to buy a pair of Everlast boxing gloves. He had a paper route — “I can’t lose this job, Mom” — making $3.50 an hour. Minimum wage plus tips. His father once took him to the toy store with John Paul Getty III, nephew of Newsom père’s close pal and grandson of the world’s richest man. Typical boyhood stuff.

About the Author

Vahaken Mouradian

Vahaken Mouradian is the literary editor of National Review.

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Brand Management 101: If you were a status hound who has observed two (remarkably unappealing, it must be said) women and one octogenarian blow your party’s chances against a (remarkably unappealing, it must be said) septuagenarian, and you were to write a memoir, wouldn’t you work the phrase “young man” into its title? Gavin Newsom is 58: not exactly young, but, as the physicist said after he took a paternity test, it’s all relative. A memoir by a non-retiring elected official has two principal functions: to increase that official’s name recognition in advance of the next campaign, and to adorn with its insubstantial spine the shelves of Airbnb rentals. Check and check? No. Newsom wants more. Young Man in a Hurry is a sorry attempt to invite young men back into a party that has done its best to excommunicate young men.

California’s governor was once lanky and introverted and dyslexic and diligent. A few of these he still is. He had a distant, though in no sense absent, father, who studied French literature and settled for law, and who was never very good with money but always around a great deal of it. Young Gavin was bullied: “Hey, Newscum, you seem in a hurry.” (Schoolkids in the late ’70s came up with that put-down, you hear?) He was, he is, an obsessive perfectionist. Grandma Jean in the ’30s “thumbed her nose at the Red Scare and took a flight to Soviet Russia,” where she stayed for three years. She gave him colored pencils and taught him to “draw beyond the linear”; to see beauty in his mistakes. Useful for a career in central planning. He saw Rocky and purged his piggy bank to buy a pair of Everlast boxing gloves. He had a paper route — “I can’t lose this job, Mom” — making $3.50 an hour. Minimum wage plus tips. His father once took him to the toy store with John Paul Getty III, nephew of Newsom père’s close pal and grandson of the world’s richest man. Typical boyhood stuff.