Take It From a Californian—Gavin Newsom Isn’t President Material | Opinion

American voters are no longer taking Joe Biden‘s mental acuity for granted. Pundits have begun to name several possible replacements at the top of the Democratic ticket—most often it’s California Governor Gavin Newsom. Few are enthused about this prospect, however. Even Newsom’s home paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, ran a surprisingly hostile op-ed this week titled “Gavin Newsom is mentally checking himself out of California and into the White House.”

A Newsom nomination would be disastrous for the Democrats. Six out of 10 Californians believe the state is moving in the wrong direction and the governor’s approval rating is now under 50 percent. His faults are so many, the GOP may find it difficult to pick one to attack.

Homelessness has been Newsom’s signature issue since he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2004. Back then, the city establishment favorite championed the Care Not Cash plan, which promised to crack down on panhandling. Those were the good old days when comparatively few addicts hung out in the Tenderloin neighborhood. In a few short years, homelessness in California, and especially in San Francisco, exploded. “Encampments” swallowed centrally located areas of the city, and fecal matter and syringes made the California nightmare notorious worldwide.

As governor, Newsom has proposed various schemes, like putting the homeless in swanky hotels or brand-new campers. Billions of dollars later, half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless live in the Golden State.

For Newsom, it’s a lifelong failure of vision. The governor is seemingly unable to understand that American homelessness is a feature not of lack of housing and services but of mental health problems, addiction, and criminality; that homeless individuals often resist treatment; and that the virtually unrestricted flow of hard drugs through our cities is central to the problem.

Lawlessness is another part of the California nightmare. The largest sanctuary state in the nation drastically reduced criminal penalties with the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014 and in 2016 opened prison doors following the approval of Proposition 57. The two measures are often cited as the leading reasons why gangs are able to organize leisurely shoplifting sprees of entire stores and drug dealers buy villas in Honduras on income from the sale of deadly narcotics to Americans. Now that retailers and prosecutors are crafting a ballot measure to roll back Prop 47, Newsom is plotting to undermine his critics with a series of weaker crime-fighting alternatives.

Watered-down law enforcement is only part of the trouble with Newsom’s approach. Being a creature of the San Francisco machine, Newsom knows how to allot favors and the overregulated business environment offers many opportunities for corruption to flourish. For instance, after raising the minimum wage across the state and bragging about it, the governor gave exemptions to large corporations like Panera—though following a scandal his campaign donors at the company announced they wouldn’t be taking the exemption.

“OK,” you might say. “California is lawless and corrupt, but at least women and minorities have more rights.” If by “women’s rights,” we mean unregulated abortion up to a baby’s birth, then maybe. But ethnic strife is on the rise in California.

Antisemitic demonstrations in the Iranian Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles and on California college campuses did not spring out of nowhere. The state’s K-12 schools are allowed to teach something called Liberated Ethnic Studies, a curriculum option for the Ethnic Studies graduation requirement. Newsom has acknowledged that antisemitic bias is a problem, but is apparently in no hurry to tackle it.

Why California students who consistently rank among the lowest in the nation on standardized tests for reading and math are busying themselves with Ethnic Studies is an excellent question. Regardless, the state finds ways to sew division in a variety of ways. For instance, in 2021, at the height of the BLM movement, Newsom appointed a first-in-the-nation reparations task force. The project fell flat—the task force issued recommendations to compensate Black Americans not for slavery, but for racism, and these compensations would involve government programs instead of direct payments. In other words, nothing new. But with 60 percent of Californians opposing reparations, why were Newsom’s Black constituents fed the false promises of riches? It’s hard to see how such policies would lead to interracial harmony.

Newsom is also in the habit of painting a rosy picture of California liberty. Reaching back into history, he’ll bring up iconic moments like the 1960s’ Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. This one always makes me chuckle—there is no free speech on California’s campuses, not when riots disrupt events hosted by conservative groups.

California leads the nation in having a horrible record on liberty, not excluding the handling of the COVID crisis. Newsom was the first U.S. governor to close his state and then was slow to reopen, and his measures were as arbitrary as they were draconian. As ordinary people scrambled to keep their lives together and seniors were dying alone, one citizen snapped pictures of the chief executive dining indoors, in a large company of friends and donors, at the high-end restaurant French Laundry. Never let that be forgotten.

More rife with symbolism than the fentanyl shantytowns, the ghost avenues of closed boutiques, or Newsom’s own decadent lifestyle is the burning of Paradise. The Northern California town of Paradise was entirely wiped out by wildfires in 2018, feeding into the national media the images of self-immolation of the California dream. The disaster caused the deaths of 85 and evacuation of 52,000 people.

Spurred by decades of poor forest management, wildfires have tormented California in recent years. The 2024 fire season is already off to an early start. If it picks up as firefighters fear it will—and considering that it usually peaks in the fall—Newsom’s prospective presidential campaign would have to take place against the backdrop of a California inferno.

Considering their lack of options, however, Democrats might not have a choice but to nominate the slick San Franciscan. Choose wisely, America.

Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.