Vogue Embarrasses Itself in Its Gushing Profile of ‘Embarrassingly Handsome’ Newsom

A reporter who is sent to write a profile of a governor and likely presidential candidate should be embarrassed to write sentences like these:

Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address. “In Washington, the president believes that might makes right,” pronounces California governor Gavin Newsom. “Secret police, businesses raided, windows smashed, citizens detained, citizens shot, masked men snatching people in broad daylight. . . .” His tone is temperate, but the words echo through the State Capitol’s Assembly chamber, the august backdrop for his speech. “Lining the pockets of the rich; crony capitalism at an unimaginable scale,” he goes on. “Rolling back rights. . . . Rewriting history.” Newsom shakes his head, seeming more mournful than angry. Seeming, yes, presidential. “None of this is normal.”

It must drive Trump nuts. Newsom: lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque. Add to that his stunning wife and four adorable kids, and the executive strut of a self-made millionaire who has spent the past seven years at the helm of a state big, complex, and rich enough to be a nation of its own.

Wait, it gets worse.

Newsom’s lanky frame was folded onto a sofa a bit too low-slung for him. This made him lean back—away from me. Or it could be that his body language had nothing to do with ergonomics and is a function of Newsom’s quality of being at once gregarious and aloof. “Easy to get along with, hard to know,” is how former San Francisco Chronicle columnist and KCBS radio analyst Phil Matier puts it. “Does he bare his soul? Not easily,” says Stanlee Gatti, one of Newsom’s dearest friends. Gatti met Newsom well before he stumbled into a career in politics, back when Newsom was just a hustling San Francisco restaurateur and wine merchant, honorary member of the wealthy Getty clan, and in-demand bachelor-about-town. At the time, Gatti did not see a mayoralty, governorship, or a presidency on the horizon. “Gavin’s too much of an artist,” he explains. “He’s a sensitive soul.”

Yet this is what Vogue‘s Maya Singer chose to write in her wildly effusive profile of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Singer was the correspondent who wrote Vogue‘s cover piece on former first lady Jill Biden.

First, you can’t be “at once gregarious and aloof.” Gregarious means to enjoy the company of others; aloof means removed or distant either physically or emotionally. You can be one or the other at different times, but you can’t exhibit both qualities simultaneously.

Now, if I’m evaluating a potential future president, I want to know what he’s done in his past as an elected official and what he wants to do as president. I don’t care if the correspondent finds him “embarrassingly handsome.” I don’t care if the correspondent thought she spotted “a glimmer of optimism in his eye.” I don’t care how he sits in a chair. (He’s not running to be captain of a Starfleet vessel.)

Singer writes:

There were topics I didn’t get to discuss with him—the LA wildfires, contraction and corporate consolidation in Hollywood, homelessness, the coming AI apocalypse, to name a few—but where we did range, I saw a man who likes spitballing, trying ideas on for size.

As today’s Morning Jolt coincidentally notes, in 2004, as mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom pledged to end chronic homelessness within ten years. He did not achieve that goal. In 2021, as governor, Newsom pledged to end family homelessness in California “within five years.” The fact that Newsom keeps making big promises and then doesn’t keep them seems like a more relevant point than whatever Singer thought she saw in the governor’s eyes.

I don’t expect better of Vogue; they are hell-bent on covering major Democratic politicians in a manner indistinguishable from a profile of George Clooney or one of the Hemsworth brothers. Actual government policy decisions and their consequences appear to bore their readers; their profiles and the accompanying Annie Leibovitz photo spreads emphasize the glamour, the charisma, the shine on the surface.

Back in 2022, I wrote how the celebrity-industrial complex had actually hindered ludicrously overhyped Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams:

Besides the big mainstream-news institutions — the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Time magazine, etc. — there’s an adjacent series of cultural publications: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and a few others.

Those publications want Democratic heroes to celebrate. They’d like to be David Maraniss, writing profile pieces about the then-little-known Bill Clinton in 1992, or William Finnegan, writing a New Yorker profile of a relatively unknown state senator back in 2004, with the prescient quote, “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” The subtext to a lot of the glossy covers and lengthy profiles featuring these Democratic Party figures is, “We’ve found him! This is it! This is the guy! This is the one you’ve been waiting for!”

These cultural publications are staffed by people who live in New York, who largely went to good schools, and who are almost always way further to the left than the average American. Their interest in actual policy varies a lot, and they often have a wildly unrealistic sense of how legislation actually gets passed; they may not have taken many political-science courses, but they’ve watched a lot of episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Perhaps most importantly, their sense of what is good, intriguing, and worthy of being saluted is often out of whack compared to the tastes of the overall American electorate. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has misled a lot of candidates over the years.) They are the kinds of people who can get genuinely excited about Kirsten Gillibrand and convince themselves that she’s the Next Big Thing in national politics. (In the end, all Americans wanted was some ranch dressing.)

In other words, the kinds of people who decide which Democrats deserve the glossy-profile treatment don’t think like the general American public, and they really don’t think like the electorates of southern states.