Gavin Newsom Wants to Be Governor of California. Would You Hire Him?

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Polarizing Figure: During Newsom's first campaign for mayor, he has burned in effigy by gay activist who accused him of turning against the city's poor. Photograph by Creative Commons

Gavin Newsom wants to be the governor of California. Eventually. "But not now!" he laughs ruefully. "Let me wait until next year. Who the heck wants it now!"

Newsom, the famously hair-gelled, gay-marrying, hate-him-or-love-him mayor of San Francisco, has politely interrupted our conversation at Max's Opera Cafe, a favorite haunt near San Francisco City Hall, to check a text on his iPhone. Breaking news: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has just announced the layoffs of 5,000 state workers and proposed the sale of beloved state-owned landmarks, his most recent fist shake at the budget gods to stave off California's fiscal disaster. "Well, that's not surprising," says Newsom.

The state is bedeviled by plunging revenues, widespread foreclosures, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and a shaky credit rating, all being tackled by an openly loathed legislature with an 11% approval rating -- and a governance system that seems frozen in a bygone era. By all best estimates, California, the eighth-largest economy in the world, is staring into a $20 billion black hole.

Over green tea and appetizers, Newsom does a perfect impression of the Governator, who had called to lobby for his support in the state-budget battle. "Oh, Gavin, come on. You got your rainy-day fund and San Francisco is doing well... ." Newsom concedes that California needs some of the things that Schwarzenegger proposed, "but not thrown together in the dead of night, just to make a deal." What the state needs, he says, is a revolution. And a little less democracy.

"We need to dramatically change the state's governance structure," he tells me, to do away with "turn-of-the-century rules and regulations that haven't been reviewed in relation to each other or in the reality of a modern world." One target: the requirement that two-thirds of the legislature approve the budget. "Arkansas and Rhode Island are the only two other states that have this requirement," he says. (He's only partly right. Arkansas has a three-quarters threshold for most appropriations; a handful of other states require supermajorities in some cases.) "If the rationale is that it is supposed to help the voters control spending -- can anyone tell me that California has been restrained?" He also believes that shifting more decision making to a regional level would mean a saner conversation about how to allocate resources and make decisions. And, of course, there is tax policy, which, he says, is based in a manufacturing mindset, rather than the realities of a service economy. "Why do we have sales taxes on golf balls and not a round of golf? Why on pet supplies and not on vet services?"

Newsom, 41, is a walking, talking PowerPoint presentation, a blizzard of ideas, stats, and plans. He's a stunningly good broadcaster of information, but listening can turn into a battle of wills and attention spans. "I'm long-winded, I know. I accept that critique," he says, smiling. This is my second sit-down with him in San Francisco. I've also watched him testify before Congress on greening affordable-housing stock, lead a tour of a homeless facility at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and speechify before gay-marriage true believers at a D.C. funder -- always without notes.

But for all his skills, Newsom is a polarizing figure. He has been hailed as a governance pioneer and burned in effigy. He's criticized for everything from his sartorial flair to his trips to Davos. The local media savage him, and his affair with his secretary -- the wife of his campaign manager -- gave them plenty of ammunition. He is known nationally as a poster boy for gay civil rights and an architect of the same-sex-marriage movement (and perhaps not known enough for his attempts to make San Francisco a greener city where everyone has a home and health care).

Now he wants to take on a massive leadership challenge. California may be too big to fail -- but how can the state that's home to two sectors critical to the entire U.S. economy, tech and entertainment, be saved? It's the kind of transformation many legacy-bound corporations, from the auto companies to Wall Street banks, are struggling to achieve. In fact, California is so devilishly hard to run that it might make even some carmakers grateful for their comparatively simple task.

Currently, this pretty boy with baggage is a long shot to become governor; he would need to beat the likes of Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman, the ex-CEO of eBay. But his ground game, a series of town-hall forums around the state, has been surprisingly successful, even in some conservative zip codes. The drumbeat is growing for a constitutional convention. California may be sufficiently broken to jettison its take-it-to-the-voters decision making and remake its governmental structure. Can Newsom advance that idea -- as he did with same-sex marriage -- even if he doesn't win?