Governor: Former S.F. mayor set to take his place on national stage
Gavin Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor who has spent the past eight years waiting in the wings of Sacramento as lieutenant governor, seized a role on the national stage Tuesday when the Democrat cruised to election as California’s next governor.
Having defeated Republican businessman John Cox, Newsom will take over a state that would have the world’s fifth-largest economy if it were a country. And increasingly, in President Trump’s America, California has been behaving as if it were a country, challenging the adminis-
tration’s authority on everything from immigration policy to greenhouse gas regulation and control of public lands.
Newsom, 51, will now have four years to show that he is more than a leader of the antiTrump resistance. He must solve problems that have cast California in an unflattering light nationally — a growing poverty rate even amid widespread wealth, homelessness that seems intractably rooted in cities and has spread to rural areas, and housing costs that threaten to turn a generation of young people into lifelong renters or drive them from the state entirely.
During his victory speech Tuesday in Los Angeles, Newsom rhapsodized about the exceptionalism of the California dream while warning Trump not to disrupt it with “the politics of chaos.”
In California, “we don’t demean, we don’t discriminate and we don’t demoralize. We don’t separate families and we don’t lock kids in cages,” Newsom said. “There’s a reason why California’s dream is America’s leading brand. Because California’s dream has always been and always will be too big to fail and too powerful to bully.”
This was Newsom’s second campaign for governor, after he aborted the first one in 2009 when Jerry Brown decided to enter the race. That was one of a few dips in a career that has careened from groundbreaking moves — approving same-sex marriages six weeks after becoming mayor in 2004 and offering universal health care to San Francisco residents — to public embarrassments like his consensual 2005 affair with a City Hall employee who was married to his campaign manager.
Newsom has never shied from championing leadingedge, often controversial ideas, whether it was the Care Not Cash program in San Francisco that replaced most direct welfare payments for the homeless with housing and services, or the statewide legalization of recreational cannabis. Yet two questions have always shadowed Newsom: whether he can transform his ideas into policy and how much he is driven by his future political ambitions.
“He will try to get some victories early, because being governor of California is not the last item on his bucket list,” said Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science at Menlo College in Atherton.
But few of California’s problems will be easy to solve as Newsom takes over from the 80-year-old Brown. Throughout the campaign, Newsom said income inequality would be a top concern in his administration. “We are living in the richest and the poorest state in America. How can that possibly be in an economy as robust as ours?” he asked during a September campaign stop in Modesto.
Here is what a Newsom governorship is likely to focus on:
Housing: Newsom wants California to build its way out of the housing shortage. He aims to build 500,000 new homes a year until 2025, a goal he concedes is “audacious” — probably because California has built more than 300,000 homes in a year only twice in the past six decades, according to the Construction Industry Research Board.
He also wants the state to offer $500 million in tax credits to developers to spur the construction of affordable housing. That’s nearly six times the current level.
Homelessness: Newsom was elected San Francisco mayor in 2003 partly on the strength of his Care Not Cash program. He has signaled that state government will get more involved in addressing the issue.
He has proposed creating a state homelessness czar and giving tax credits to landlords who rent to homeless people. And he said that it will take a regional approach to solving the affordable housing and homeless issues. “Other cities and the state need to step up their game,” Newsom said in August.
Health care: In September 2017, Newsom told the California Nurses Association convention in San Francisco, “You have my firm and absolute commitment as your next governor that I will lead the effort to get it done. We will get universal health care.”
In April, however, Newsom tempered his enthusiasm about how fast the state could set up a single-payer system that would make the government the provider of health care, something the nurses union and many other progressives endorse. He estimated it could be years before single-payer is in place. “It is not an act that would occur by the signature of the next governor,” he said.
While Newsom spent the campaign focused on what he’d do as governor, Cox railed on Newsom as the embodiment of “the political class” that has made the state “virtually unaffordable and unlivable for the average forgotten, hard-working Californian.” Newsom all but ignored him. He took two bus tours of the state and spent as much time pumping up Democrats running in House races as he did campaigning for governor.
Newsom got into San Francisco politics in 1995 after hosting a fundraiser at his PlumpJack Cafe for then-mayoral candidate Willie Brown, now a Chronicle columnist. The next year, Brown appointed him to the Parking and Traffic Commission and in 1997 to a vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors. Newsom was re-elected three times before succeeding Brown as mayor. He left the middle of his second term at City Hall after being elected lieutenant governor.