Gov. Newsom lays ground for fight against his recall
SACRAMENTO >> Standing alone in center field of an empty Dodger Stadium, Gov. Gavin Newsom cast himself as a bold if imperfect leader and his state as on the cusp of a new day.
Officially it was the annual State of the State address but the Tuesday night speech also served as the unofficial campaign kickoff for the first-term Democrat, who almost certainly will face a recall election later this year that is fueled by criticism of this handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Newsom shed his typical long-windedness and sometimes hard-to-understand jargon for a crisp, 28-minute speech that he scheduled in the evening in Los Angeles to try to maximize viewership. He’s prone to heavy use of numbers and statistics, but this time stayed above the surface, talking about California’s future in broad, optimistic terms.
The governor “led all framing and tweaking and finalized the speech himself,” while the writing team was led by Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Newsom with a focus on housing and homelessness, said Sahar Roberston,
Newsom’s senior communications adviser.
Though Newsom gave only passing reference to the campaign against him, he did so in the most explicit terms yet, referring to organizers as “promoting partisan political power grabs with outdated prejudices.”
Newsom’s remarks were adopted as anti-recall talking points by politicians from the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in a Wednesday morning news conference, where they painted the recall as driven by adherents of former Republican President Donald Trump and conspiracy theorists.
“Let’s call this recall what it is: a partisan political power grab,” said Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco.
Recall organizers are Republicans and say they’ve collected nearly 2 million signatures, well above the 1.5 million needed by March 17 to force an election. The GOP has only 24% of registered California voters, but organizers say they are attracting Democrats and independents to the cause.
“There are a lot of Democrats who are frustrated,” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon conceded after Newsom’s speech.