Gavin Newsom is off and running, eyeing the White House as he enters the far turn and his final year as California governor.
The track record for California Democrats and the presidency is not a good one. In the nearly 250 years of these United States, not one Left Coast Democrat has ever been elected president. Kamala Harris is just the latest to fail. (Twice.)
Can Newsom break that losing streak and make history in 2028?
Faithful readers of this column — both of you — certainly know how I feel.
Garry South disagrees.
The veteran Democratic campaign strategist, who has been described as possessing “a pile-driving personality and blast furnace of a mouth” — by me, actually — has never lacked for strong and colorful opinions. Here, in an email exchange, we hash out our differences.
Barabak: You once worked for Newsom, did you not?
South: Indeed I did. I was a senior strategist in his first campaign for governor. It lasted 15 months in 2008 and 2009. He exited the race when we couldn’t figure out how to beat Jerry Brown in a closed Democratic primary.
I happen to be the one who wrote the catchy punch line for Newsom’s speech to the state Democratic convention in 2009, that the race was a choice between “a stroll down memory lane vs. a sprint into the future.”
We ended up on memory lane.
Barabak: Do you still advise Newsom, or members of his political team?
South: No, though he and I are in regular contact and have been since his days as lieutenant governor. I know many of his staff and consultants, but don’t work with them in any paid capacity. Also, the governor’s sister and I are friends.
Barabak: You observed Newsom up close in that 2010 race. What are his strengths as a campaigner?
South: Newsom is a masterful communicator, has great stage presence, cuts a commanding figure and can hold an audience in the palm of his hand when he’s really on. He has a mind like a steel trap and never forgets anything he is told or reads.
I’ve always attributed his amazing recall to the struggle he has reading, due to his lifelong struggle with severe dyslexia. Because it’s such an arduous effort for Newsom to read, what he does read is emblazoned on his mind in seeming perpetuity.
Barabak: Demerits, or weaknesses?
South: Given his remarkable command of facts and data and mastery of the English language, he can sometimes run on too long. During that first gubernatorial campaign, when he was still mayor of San Francisco, he once gave a seven-hour State of the City address.
Barabak: Fidel Castro must have been impressed!
South: It wasn’t as bad as sounds: It was broken into 10 “Webisodes” on his YouTube channel. But still …
Barabak: So let’s get to it. I think Newsom’s chances of being elected president are somewhere between slim and none — and slim was last seen alongside I-5, in San Ysidro, thumbing a ride to Mexico.
You don’t agree.
South: I don’t agree at all. I think you’re underestimating the Trumpian changes wrought (rot?) upon our political system over the past 10 years.
The election of Trump, a convicted felon, not once but twice, has really blown to hell the conventional paradigms we’ve had for decades in terms of how we assess the viability of presidential candidates — what state they’re from, their age, if they have glitches in their personal or professional life.
Not to mention, oh, their criminal record, if they have one.
The American people actually elected for a second term a guy who fomented a rebellion against his own country when he was president the first time, including an armed assault on our own national capitol in which a woman was killed and for which he was rightly impeached. It’s foolish not to conclude that the old rules, the old conventional wisdom about what voters will accept and what they will not, are out the window for good.
It also doesn’t surprise me that you pooh-pooh Newsom’s prospects. It’s typical of the home-state reporting corps to guffaw when their own governor is touted as a presidential candidate.
One, familiarity breeds contempt. Two, a prophet is without honor in his own country.
Barabak: I’ll grant you a couple of points.
I’m old enough to remember when friends in the Arkansas political press corps scoffed at the notion their governor, the phenomenally gifted but wildly undisciplined Bill Clinton, could ever be elected president.
I also remember those old Clairol hair-color ads: “The closer he gets … the better you look!” (Google it, kids). It’s precisely the opposite when it comes to presidential hopefuls and the reporters who cover them day-in, day-out.
And you’re certainly correct, the nature of what constitutes scandal, or disqualifies a presidential candidate, has drastically changed in the Trump era.
All of that said, certain fundamentals remain the same. Harking back to that 1992 Clinton campaign, it’s still the economy, stupid. Or, put another way, it’s about folks’ lived experience, their economic security, or lack thereof, and personal well-being.
Newsom is, for the moment, a favorite among the chattering political class and online activists because a) those are the folks who are already engaged in the 2028 race and b) many of them thrill to his Trumpian takedowns of the president on social media.
When the focus turns to matters affecting voters’ ability to pay for housing, healthcare, groceries, utility bills and to just get by, Newsom’s opponents will have a heyday trashing him and California’s steep prices, homelessness and shrinking middle class.
Kamala Harris twice bid unsuccessfully for the White House. Her losses kept alive an unbroken string of losses by Left Coast Democrats.
(Kent Nishimura / Getty Images)
South: It’s not just the chattering class.
Newsom’s now the leading candidate among rank-and-file Democrats. They had been pleading — begging — for years that some Democratic leader step out of the box, step up to the plate, and fight back, giving Trump a dose of his own medicine. Newsom has been meeting that demand with wit, skill and doggedness — not just on social media, but through passage of Proposition 50, the Democratic gerrymandering measure.
And Democrats recognize and appreciate it
Barabak: Hmmm. Perhaps I’m somewhat lacking in imagination, but I just can’t picture a world where Democrats say, “Hey, the solution to our soul-crushing defeat in 2024 is to nominate another well-coiffed, left-leaning product of that bastion of homespun Americana, San Francisco.”
South: Uh, Americans twice now have elected a president not just from New York City, but who lived in an ivory tower in Manhattan, in a penthouse with a 24-carat-gold front door (and, allegedly, gold-plated toilet seats). You think Manhattan is a soupçon more representative of middle America than San Francisco?
Like I said, state of origin is less important now after the Trump precedent.
Barabak: Trump was a larger-than-life — or at least larger-than-Manhattan — celebrity. Geography wasn’t an impediment because he had — and has — a remarkable ability, far beyond my reckoning, to present himself as a tribune of the working class, the downtrodden and economically struggling Americans, even as he spreads gold leaf around himself like a kid with a can of Silly String.
Speaking of Kamala Harris, she hasn’t ruled out a third try at the White House in 2028. Where would you place your money in a Newsom-Harris throwdown for the Democratic nomination? How about Harris in the general election, against whomever Republicans choose?
South: Harris running again in 2028 would be like Michael Dukakis making a second try for president in 1992. My God, she not only lost every swing state, and the electoral college by nearly 100 votes, Harris also lost the popular vote — the first Democrat to do so in 20 years.
If she doesn’t want to embarrass herself, she should listen to her home-state voters, who in the latest CBS News/YouGov poll said she shouldn’t run again — by a margin of 69-31. (Even 52% of Democrats said no). She’s yesterday’s news.
Barabak: Seems as though you feel one walk down memory lane was quite enough. We’ll see if Harris — and, more pertinently, Democratic primary voters — agree.
Mark Z. Barabak
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