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

Newsom has just come from a budget negotiation gone sour -- the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 rejected some $38 million in wage concessions. (Shortly after our meeting, Newsom announces 1,000 job cuts to help close a $438 million budget deficit. The hardest hit will be the Department of Public Health.) But he has also had some recent successes. He broke ground on a water-system-improvement project outside the city limits that will help create 28,000 jobs in the Bay Area. "Our bond rating went up; we were able to sell our bonds," he says. The state's rating, in contrast, has slipped.

Newsom's campaign embraces all the bells and whistles of modern stumping. He announced his candidacy on Twitter and had his first official appearance at Facebook headquarters, in Palo Alto. "We're picking up where Barack left off," he says.

The combination of technology, entrepreneurialism, and data crunching, Newsom says, could offer a blueprint for change around the state, as it has in the city. He points to an extended survey of San Francisco done by his administration that revealed that "the vast majority of our challenges arose within seven street corners." The area, near Bayview -- Hunters Point, has been a picture of despair, plagued by toxic waste dumps, high crime, and persistent poverty, and mired in development-related litigation. The study provided a literal road map of community need and inefficiently delivered services. "There was no system, no way to coordinate what the city was doing," Newsom explains. From that survey came $4 million in grant money and a program called Communities of Opportunity. It has been slow going and residents remain skeptical, but Newsom insists that the seeds of progress are there: "We are creating a businesslike approach that gets agencies to work interdependently."

If it is this difficult to turn around a single neighborhood, could it be that California, like, say, Citigroup, is not only too big to fail, but also too big to manage? Newsom argues that the size and diversity of the state make local control of money and priorities driven by data essential: "I understand how specific the issues are to each region."

Yet today, Sacramento controls the purse strings. And that, according to Jim Mayer, the executive director of California Forward, a bipartisan group hoping to influence a total overhaul of the state's governance system, is an unintended consequence of Prop 13. "What most people don't realize is that in addition to capping property taxes, Prop 13 consolidated power into silos of programs and layers of bureaucracy in Sacramento," he says. "We have 8, 9, possibly 10 major economic regions with vastly different needs. We should decentralize." Mayer believes that there are easier ways to fix California than a constitutional convention. "Some of it will be legislative, some ballot-oriented, but a lot will come from cultural change," he says. "This is where new systems of local governance can make a difference."

This speaks to Newsom's point. Local insight and related action is what people want, he contends. "We have patience for government when we can see it work in our lives." Politics "is about stop signs and street corners, as much as anything else."

"We have patience with government when we can see it work in our lives," Newsom says. "It's about stop signs and street corners."

That focus has made Newsom a favorite son within the U.S. Conference of Mayors. I learned that the hard way. Last year during the annual conference in Miami, I accompanied a gaggle of mayors, led by Newsom, the co-chair of its Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, to a meeting and tour of a homeless facility. As usual, he spoke knowledgeably and without notes to a rapt crowd. Afterward, I spied him rushing back to the conference venue in his own motorcade, instead of taking the minibus with the rest of us. I asked where he was going and took out my notebook. Suddenly, three dozen mayors turned on me. "Hey! Leave Gavin alone!" one shouted. "He's amazing!" Angry murmurs, then the kicker: "Anyway, he's riding in a hybrid!" Getting California voters to share this enthusiasm will require a gargantuan effort -- second only to the task of saving the state.