Newsom lays ground for fight against recall
Governor’s State of the State address in new setting touts progress being made, especially on coronavirus.
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he did so in the most explicit terms yet, referring to organizers as “promoting partisan political power grabs with outdated prejudices.”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.
Critics say Newsom has been too restrictive during the health crisis, shuttering businesses and limiting people’s activities far longer than necessary. They also say he has not followed his own directives, notably when he attended a lobbyist’s birthday party at the fancy French Laundry restaurant last fall as he was telling Californians to stay home.
Newsom acknowledged “mistakes” Tuesday but left out specifics, saying only that “we own them, we learn from them, and we never stop trying.”
Republicans blasted the speech as overtly political.
“Gavin’s State of the State address was nothing more than a desperate campaign commercial, paid for by taxpayers, that attempts to explain away a level of incompetence no other governor in California history has reached,” Jessica Millan Patterson, the chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said in a statement.
Dr. Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, said the campaign undertones were clear, particularly in Newsom’s choice of venue. Normally the State of the State is delivered to a joint session of the Legislature from the Capitol in Sacramento.
The usual packed room was impossible with coronavirus restrictions, and rather than speaking to an empty legislative chamber Newsom chose an empty baseball stadium in the state’s largest city.
Newsom chose Dodger Stadium because it holds about 56,000 people, nearly the number of Californians who have died from the coronavirus.