Why Newsom wants to face GOP rival in fall
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested Tuesday that California Democrats might be better off with a Republican running against him on the November ballot for governor, rather than dealing with an expensive, Democrat versus Democrat battle.
Newsom, who is running first in the polls, dismissed complaints from his Democratic opponents that a Republican on the top of the ticket in the fall would bring out GOP voters and make it harder for his party to flip targeted congressional seats and retake the House. And he passed up a chance to disavow an independent campaign on his behalf, funded by labor groups and Blue Shield of California, that Democratic candidates say is promoting San Diego County businessman John Cox, one of the two main Republicans in the top-two primary.
With a no-hope Republican running against Newsom for governor in November in a deep-blue state like California, the party could focus its resources on winning those Republican-held congressional seats, Newsom said.
As a candidate for governor, supporting Democratic congressional candidates would be “more difficult when you have $100 million coming at you,” Newsom said, an amount of money he insisted was possible in a Democrats-only general election for the state’s top job.
Democrats shouldn’t worry that
Republicans will flock to the polls in November to vote for Cox, Newsom said. It’s hard to believe, he said, “that John Cox is going to drive Republican turnout.”
Newsom’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview on a bus ride from San Francisco City Hall to San Jose, first stop on a days-long campaign trip through California. While he insisted that he’s not looking past Tuesday’s primary — “We’re running a 100-yard dash, not a 90-yard dash” — many of his answers reflected an awareness that a top-two finish is going to leave a lot of Californians, many of them not current supporters, wondering just what Newsom would do as governor.
The former San Francisco mayor, whose front-running campaign has the enthusiastic support of single-payer health care advocates, went out of his way to tamp down the expectations of backers looking for an instant victory and rapid end to the long-running health care debate. Bringing a singlepayer health care system to California is going to take far more than a single vote for a single governor, Newsom said.
“I get the exuberance,” Newsom said. “But all of this is a basket of challenges.”
A single-payer bill that died in the Assembly last year “sets up a mechanism to begin the process” of converting to the radically revised health care system, Newsom said.
Getting the required federal waivers, looking at possible tax consequences and, above all, figuring out the costs for single-payer are going to take time, Newsom said.
He promised not to be reckless, but open and thoughtful when it comes to dealing with the single-payer question.
“We can’t do anything without the concurrence of the voters and the federal government,” Newsom said. “But what is reckless is doing nothing,” since health care costs are a rapidly growing part of the state budget and the budgets of individual California families.
Time and again, Newsom argued that his plans for the state take California’s financial health into consideration.
In looking at preschool for all, an early childhood education effort that is one of Newsom’s top priorities, the candidate said he and his advisers have come up with a number of plans, ranging from a barebones effort costing a few hundred million a year to a top-shelf, child-care-included plan “that costs north of $8 billion a year.”
Gov. Jerry Brown’s successful, tightfisted effort to claw the state back from the brink of financial disaster — and the pleased response it received from voters — has changed the way Democrats can govern the state, Newsom said.
“I’m not going to be a profligate Democrat,” he said, adding that he has experience governing in tough financial times as San Francisco’s mayor during the recession.
Despite his reputation as one of the most liberal candidates in the governor’s race, “I was hard-headed and pragmatic as mayor and I’ll be hard-headed and pragmatic as governor,” Newsom said.
He touched briefly on the more than $17 million that charter school supporters backing former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have tossed into the race.
“I support high-quality nonprofit charter schools,” Newsom said, although he also has backed efforts to block the development of more charter schools until rules can be set on making their operations more open to scrutiny.
“I’ll call balls and strikes going both ways” as governor, he said. “I’m a reformer at heart and not a supporter of the status quo. I don’t know if anyone is a supporter of the status quo.”