Newsom says he’ll see job through
Governor, on eve of vote, not dwelling on mistakes
After a tumultuous year and a half, in which a never-ending pandemic consumed his governorship and landed him in only the second gubernatorial recall election in California history, Gavin Newsom owns up to his mistakes. Well, one of them.
His attendance last November at a birthday dinner for a longtime friend and political adviser at the French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley, in violation of his own restrictions at the time on mixing between households, has dogged him ever since.
The party helped breathe new life into the recall drive against the first-term Democrat and has provided endless fodder for the candidates seeking to replace him. Even as public polling
indicates that Newsom should defeat the recall this week in a landslide, more than half of Californians — including a third of Democrats — recently said they see the governor as someone who believes he is above his own rules.
Newsom thinks he deserves a bit more credit.
“I made a mistake, and I recognized it. A lot of folks don’t even acknowledge mistakes, and we did that,” he told The Chronicle in an interview Saturday, after a campaign rally in Oakland with volunteers from local unions.
To his mind, his public apology three days after The Chronicle broke the news of the party was his fresh start. His leadership through the past 10 months has been making the case to Californians that he still deserves their trust.
“That’s the work we’ve been doing since,” Newsom said, “and I’m working hard and I will continue to work hard.”
When it comes to potential missteps of governance, however — a botched early reopening of the state, perhaps, or a slow vaccine rollout that he eventually turned over to a private entity, or an excruciatingly prolonged return to inperson school instruction that infuriated many Californians — Newsom is not feeling reflective.
There were difficulties, sure. Headwinds. “External challenges that put a little sand in the gear in some of the progress we were hoping to make,” as he put it at one point during the interview.
But he doesn’t care to discuss any lessons he might have learned from his mistakes over the past 18 months, or even identify a mistake at all.
“I think California’s led,” he said. “I mean, we’re the first state in America to do a stayat-home order. We think that impacted the rest of the states across the country. I think it saved lots of lives.”
Newsom pointed to his recent mask mandate for schools and vaccine requirement for health care workers, which he has repeatedly highlighted in the final weeks of the recall campaign as the most important reason not to remove him from office. Leading replacement candidates have promised to overturn those orders as soon as they take office.
“We’re continuing to stay on the cutting edge,” Newsom said.
Nor should Californians who’ve been disappointed with his handling of some the state’s most intractable problems, including widespread homelessness and recordbreaking wildfires, expect much of a change in approach from the governor should he survive the election, which wraps up Tuesday.
Newsom is proud of what he has done so far. He repeatedly returned during the interview to the record large budget that the state adopted this summer, which he called a reflection of his agenda that delivered on “so many things I promoted as a candidate.”
Because of a huge and unexpected surplus, there was “transformative spending” to expand the state’s health care program for the poor to undocumented immigrants 50 and older, increase tax credits for working parents, add more slots to prekindergarten programs and make up for cuts to university funding.
His signature homelessness program — to convert hotels, motels and other vacant buildings into supportive housing — is a collaboration with local officials such as California has never had, he said. “As a former mayor, I don’t think this, I know this, because there was no engagement, there was no strategy, no plan before I became governor on the issue of homelessness.”
And though he has come under criticism for not doing enough to clear overgrown forests that have fueled devastating wildfire seasons for the past two years, he said he supported funding increases that will begin to make up for a century of insufficient vegetation management.
“We’ve seeded a lot of investments that I think are going to pay huge dividends. So I really just want to reinforce to folks that I’m committed to finishing the job,” Newsom said. “But you can’t overpromise. These things don’t overnight change. You can’t make up for decades of neglect.”
After all, any smart politician knows that making promises you can’t keep is definitely a mistake — especially when you might be on the ballot again in just 14 months, asking the voters for a second term.