Gavin’s Gaffe May Not Matter

Gavin Newsom is on a quest to make you believe he’s the quintessential everyday American whose challenges and struggles are universally identifiable. It has not gone well.

Like an actor who cannot help but betray the stage directions in the script, Newsom cannot help but convey the extent to which he’s been overcoached by an army of consultants whose foremost goal is to neutralize his glaring political liabilities.

Last October, for example, California’s governor suddenly started talking with conspicuous frequency about the childhood malnutrition he experienced as a result of his family’s impoverishment. Newsom had not dwelled much on the years he says he spent subsisting on Wonder Bread and boxed Macaroni and Cheese, but that experience apparently came rushing back just as he embarked on a presidential campaign.

There is some truth to the governor’s story. While Newsom’s father was a lawyer for the billionaire Getty family and, later, a state appeals court judge, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the governor’s mother did work multiple jobs to make ends meet until his father’s “wealth and connections reentered the picture later in Newsom’s life.”

But we don’t have to be obtuse about this. Newsom is bringing his childhood experience to the forefront of his pitch to Democratic voters because he is, as one fellow Democrat put it, the “living embodiment of privilege.” Newsom is the guy who poses for photoshoots in luxuriously appointed apartments, who dines out at five-star restaurants while the rest of us are denied such privileges by his own policies, and whose expensive tastes are not even especially well-disguised.

It’s not that there is no truth to the details of Newsom’s biography he’s choosing to promulgate today. Rather, those details are just selectively curated. And in much the same way as that curation is designed to help the governor escape his reputation as a bon vivant, he’s also now trying to shed the notion that he is a product of the elite.

Newsom is in hot water today for delivering a speech in Atlanta, Georgia, in which he appeared to suggest that his audience was full of academic underachievers — just like himself!

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you: I’m like you. I’m no better than you,” Newsom told his audience (there are those stage directions again).

“You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy,” Newsom continued to the audience’s laughter. “And, I’m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act all there if you got 940. Literally a 960 guy, I can’t – you’ve never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech.” The governor went on to describe his own personal struggle with dyslexia, which he maintains he has not “overcome.”

It’s not hard to believe that the governor contended with the variety of developmental and learning impediments he described in Atlanta. After all, this is how Newsom apparently thinks people read books:

But as Fox News noted, Newsom’s 960 SAT score is a little over the national average of scores in 1985, when the governor took the test. And while Newsom did not receive a formal education in the Ivy League, those in the governor’s orbit are right to assume that being profiled by the Chronicle in 1991 as one of the “Children of the Rich” looking to make a name for himself will complicate the governor’s efforts to project earthy authenticity.

Whatever his motives, Newsom blew it in Atlanta.

If the governor set out to ingratiate himself with black Americans on the left, he failed. At least, he failed to impress the far-left activist Nina Turner:

Although it’s a tougher audience, black Republicans aren’t giving Newsom an inch either:

And yet, no one can watch the clip of Newsom’s gaffe and conclude that he was poorly received in the room. Democrat-voting black Americans are poorly represented by the far-left activists who populate cable news greenrooms, and their political orientation is generally not reflected in the comments of black Republicans. The California governor’s charm offensive, which has been aimed squarely at a black audience for some time now, may not be backfiring in ways the most plugged-in political observers assume that it is. After all, it was African-American Democrats in South Carolina who saved Joe Biden and the Democratic Party from a Bernie Sanders nomination in 2020.

If Newsom is looking to recreate Biden’s pathway to the presidency, he’s certainly off to a rocky start. But the same was said of Biden’s last campaign for the White House. Also like Biden, the audience for whom Newsom’s message is intended doesn’t seem all that offended by his maladroit delivery. And in the end, that was the only audience that mattered.

Update: Chris Rufo notes that, contrary to the assumption of some commentators, Newsom’s audience in Atlanta was not majority black. That does not alter this analysis, even though it did not challenge that assumption. It posits that the governor is not making a class-based appeal to Democratic primary voters by attempting to shed the effete persona he cultivated over the last decade. Moreover, the assumptions embedded in Newsom’s attempt at self-deprecation are insulting, no matter what your background may be.