San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Newsom must be bold to fix crises that Brown let fester
goals for guaranteed health care, housing and education. But, lately, he’s made Brown-style noises about not wanting to do much, so he, too, can avoid mistakes.
Newsom, if he pursues his campaign agenda forcefully, is certain to be dogged by failure. To quote the billionaire screwup Elon Musk, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Creating a new system of educational and health supports for early childhood will involve changes to existing programs that may screw up some people’s lives, and it will create a host of potentially failure-inducing challenges — including funding for such programs and the training of their staffs. Every step of creating a system that guarantees higher-quality care for everyone is likely to produce giant mistakes, given the existing system’s complexity.
Newsom’s determination to produce 3.5 million homes to ease the housing crisis will require tricky shifts in state and local laws that are all but certain to cause screwups. And his stated desire to change the Byzantine tax system in California can’t help but have nasty unintended consequences.
After the quiet Brown years, every noisy screwup will draw negative media coverage for Newsom, who, with his slick style and actress wife, is an easy person to disparage. Indeed, the best way to judge this governor might be by his press coverage. If he’s being pilloried in the papers for mistakes, that will mean he’s doing well and taking on big stuff. If things are quiet, he’s probably pulling a Brown and avoiding the hardest problems.
The good news is that Newsom will have many allies. While the media narrative of California’s comeback revolves around the 80-year-old governor, the real story of this decade is of individual Californians and communities pulling themselves out of the muck of the recession without much help from their budget-conscious state.
And many of the more high-profile legislative changes in California this decade — like the $15-per-hour minimum wage or sanctuary protections for immigrants — were not led by Brown. Instead, as University of Southern California sociologist Manuel Pastor has shown, sophisticated social movements among immigrants, labor unions and businesses forced the cautious Brown to sign on.
The outgoing governor’s instinct for inaction has created an enormous pentup hunger for state government to help tackle the ugly nightmares that keep us from realizing new California dreams. A cautious governor would temper that hunger. But California needs a leader who will feed it with real plans and engage people in the messy work of enacting them.
The new governor’s advisers, a conventional lot, may warn him against this riskier path. In response, Newsom should invoke the wisdom of the Oracle of Montecito, Oprah Winfrey: “Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.”
Dare to be great, Gavin. Be our queen of screwups.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.