The release of California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed state budget for the coming fiscal year may have been the big news in Sacramento this week (the governor and lawmakers now have the better part of the next six months to come to grips with a spending plan), but it’s Newsom’s second and final inaugural address, delivered a few days prior to the budget rollout, that’s worth the deeper dive.
Here’s why.
Unlike, say, annual state-of-the-state addresses and other long-winded policy speeches that are by-producta of constituent focus-grouping and staff groupthink, inaugural addresses tend to be more personal reflections of where the incumbent’s head is.
Here, California may have a problem, as its governor seems distracted by forces beyond his state—and individuals not necessarily germane to Newsom’s core responsibility, which of course is tending to the health and welfare of the Golden State.
Consider this mid-inaugural passage:
All across the nation, anxiety about social change has awakened long-dormant authoritarian impulses.
Calling into question what America is to become, freer and fairer . . . or reverting to a darker past.
Instead of finding solutions, these politicians void of any new ideas, pursuing power at any cost, prey upon our fears and paranoias.
“The struggle to be who we ought to be” [Newsom borrowing that phrase liberally from liberal presidential historian and Biden ghostwriter Jon Meacham] as a nation is difficult and demanding.
And that’s why we should be clear-eyed about their aims.
They’re promoting grievance and victimhood, in an attempt to erase so much of the progress you and I have witnessed in our lifetimes.
They make it harder to vote and easier to buy illegal guns.
They silence speech, fire teachers, kidnap migrants, subjugate women, attack the Special Olympics, and even demonize Mickey Mouse.
All camouflaged under a hijacking of the word “freedom.”
Brevity being the soul of wit, Newsom wasted 140+ words where five would have sufficed: “I truly loathe Ron DeSantis.”
Why Newsom’s ongoing obsession with Florida’s governor, who did indeed spar with the Special Olympics over vaccine mandates and with Disney after its former CEO denounced a Florida state law that barred teaching younger public school students about gender identity and sexual orientation (Disney losing its special state tax status after the woke outburst)?
Perhaps Newsom felt compelled respond to DeSantis’s second inaugural address, delivered in Tallahassee three days prior to Newsom’s. While DeSantis didn’t single out the Golden State, it was clear that California was on his mind. Or so it seemed in this passage:
These past few years have witnessed a great test of governing philosophies as many jurisdictions pursued a much different path than we have pursued here in Florida.
The policies pursued by these states have sparked a mass exodus of productive Americans from these jurisdiction—with Florida serving as the most desired destination, a promised land of sanity.
Many of these cities and states have embraced faddish ideology at the expense of enduring principles.
They have harmed public safety by coddling criminals and attacking law enforcement.
They have imposed unreasonable burdens on taxpayers to finance unfathomable levels of public spending.
They have harmed education by subordinating the interests of students and parents to partisan interest groups.
They have imposed medical authoritarianism in the guise of pandemic mandates and restrictions that lack a scientific basis.
This bizarre but prevalent ideology that permeates these policy measures purports to act in the name of justice for the marginalized, but it frowns upon American institutions, it rejects merit and achievement, and it advocates identity essentialism.
We reject this woke ideology.
We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy.
That’s 180+ DeSantis words, where five suffice: “I truly loathe Gavin Newsom.”
There is, however, another way to look at Newsom’s inaugural: as not so much a reflection of where he sees California these days as his desire not to step away from progressive virtue-signaling.
Several hours after Newsom’s address, another Californian had his moment in the sun (maybe not the best idiom given the Golden State’s current soggy state): Kevin McCarthy, the newly installed speaker of the House of Representatives.
Before McCarthy’s acceptance speech late last Friday, the House chamber heard from New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi’s successor as leader of the House Democratic caucus.
Whereas McCarthy took the high road in his remarks to the chamber (he called for unity and invoked Abraham Lincoln’s brief tenure as an Illinois congressman), Jeffries tossed out a slew of MSNBC expletives—“autocracy,” “bigotry,” “fascism,” “voter suppression”—in a 15-minute address that was too partisan for the moment, not to mention way too long.
Newsom took a similar rhetorical approach in parts of his inaugural address, referring to red-state “regression,” “oppression,” and “authoritarian impulses”—again, all words meant more to quicken the progressive pulse than to unify Californians.
The problem with this rhetorical overlap: Jeffries and Newsom hold jobs as different as they are distanced. The former is a legislator and a minority leader whose purpose is to nettle his colleagues on the other side of the aisle, whereas Newsom is an executive who faces little in the way of political resistance, real or imagined. Put another way: the minority leader’s mission is to disrupt, while the governor’s supposed purpose is to lead.
Perhaps this will be the defining trait of the next four years of Newsom’s reign: too much of an interest in national politics, far too much of an obsession with his red-state counterparts.
Then again, what happens if recent news accounts turn out to be true and President Biden makes himself a candidate for reelection in the near future (next month maybe, according to some reports)? Does that undermine Newsom’s efforts to posit himself as the Democrats’ conscience, if his party already has a standard-bearer in place for 2024? (I’m ruling out Newsom doing what his predecessor, Jerry Brown, did in 1980: waste a portion of his second gubernatorial term in a quixotic challenge to an incumbent Democratic president).
The good news for California: closure, on the Democratic side of presidential speculation, might mean a more engaged governor in 2023—unless DeSantis launches a presidential campaign and Newsom can’t resist the urge to take potshots.
Considering the hand dealt to Newsom as he took the gubernatorial reins for the second and last time (thanks to term limits)—winter storms, COVID’s uncertainty, the certainty of an enormous revenue shortfall—he doesn’t lack for policy challenges.
If only he can let go of the Florida obsession.
