By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Josh Barro takes a funny crowbar to California governor Gavin
Newsom, contending that Newsom’s not-so-subtle, quasi-presidential campaign
is a colossal disaster in the making for Democrats, and wondering how anyone in
the party could possibly take the idea of “Democratic presidential nominee
Gavin Newsom” seriously:
Gavin Newsom looks like the kind of
guy who would have an affair with the wife of his close friend and campaign
manager. Or who, when he was 39 and mayor of San Francisco, had a
girlfriend who was too young to drink. Or who would dine with a group of 12 at The French Laundry just
hours after warning Californians not to gather for the holidays due to COVID.
Or who would marry Kimberly Guilfoyle. Or who would pose with Guilfoyle like
this on Ann Getty’s rug. . . .
Of course, Newsom looks like that
kind of guy because he is that guy. He did all those things!
He’s practically the opposite of Relatable Joe from Scranton — an effete,
sleazy, high-handed liberal from San Francisco who seems like he might hit on
your wife, if she’s hot.
Kamala Harris would be
a better candidate.
Back in 2018, I wrote that the then-aspiring-governor with the slicked-back
hair embodied California liberalism:
The perfect appearance, the
bear-hug embrace of identity politics, the celebration of Silicon Valley moguls
tempered by hand-wringing about income inequality, the grandiose, fanciful
plans for building the state into a modern utopia. . . . His has been a life of
privilege that would get a typical Republican office-seeker torn to shreds.
“It may take future social scientists to explain why
current California voters were so willing to give this guy a pass on all the
things we know about him. . . . The 50-year-old lieutenant governor and former
mayor of San Francisco is the living embodiment of privilege, and people seem
to be OK with that,” Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos
Breton marveled back then.
We on the right can hope for Newsom to become the
Democratic presidential nominee because we see him as such an insufferably
preening, under-performing governor and the walking embodiment of the hypocrisy
and double standards of modern progressivism and/or modern California. But one
angle that really matters is that Democrats don’t see Newsom that way at all.
They like him. Last month, 82 percent of California Democrats
approved of the job he was doing, and 54 percent of self-identified
independents concurred. Ninety percent of self-identified Democrats said that
they intend to vote for his reelection.
The thing is, if the typical Democrat has any problem
with hypocrisy and double standards, they hide it really well. Maybe there was
some brief bipartisan irritation with officials who enacted sweeping pandemic
restrictions and then turned around and violated them, but that seems to be
long forgotten by now. The typical Democrat doesn’t spend much time complaining
about self-described environmentalists who fly around in private jets and who
have huge houses and massive carbon footprints. The typical Democrat shrugs off
exceptionally wealthy people who publicly bemoan economic inequality, and
they’re similarly unconcerned by white guys who talk about how it’s time for
those who have benefited from society’s deep-rooted philosophy of white
supremacy and patriarchy to step aside and empower women and minorities.
(California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, while running for president in 2019: “I may be ‘another
white guy,’ but I know where there are gaps in my knowledge or my experience
and I know when to pass the mic.” Good news, minorities! President Swalwell
will intermittently pass the microphone to you!)
It’s also unlikely that the typical Democrat would get
all that irked by Newsom’s consensual relationships when so many
Democrats choose to believe that former Minnesota senator Al Franken got a
raw deal. Even after #MeToo, an elected lawmaker is entitled to a little bit of
sexual harassment if he votes the right way on “women’s issues.”
And let’s face it: The Republican Party embraced a
billionaire because he sounded so populist, and Christian social conservatives
embraced a man who was a notorious womanizer. Heck, the evangelist preacher hiding an awful scandal is now a cliché.
When it comes down to a Republican candidate against a Democratic candidate, a
lot of Republicans can make their peace with a candidate who exaggerated his military service, or who expressed nutty views in the past, or who has no real past connection to conservative politics and causes.
Once a candidate wins that primary, his past sins get washed away and he
becomes the avatar of “our team.”
A lot of people in each party’s grassroots can avert
their eyes and pretend to not notice a lot, and/or engage in complicated mental
acrobatics to explain why the seeming hypocrisy isn’t really a problem.
It’s not hard to grasp why a lot of folks on the right
would like to see Newsom have that debate he proposed with Ron DeSantis.
The Florida governor is an emblematic incarnation of modern conservative
governance, and Newsom is his rough equivalent on the opposite side. A
Newsom–DeSantis debate would not be a rerun of Donald Trump and Joe Biden
shouting over each other — yet another sequel to Grumpy Old Men. It
would be a sharp-elbowed, full-throated, well-articulated contrast between
conservative governance and progressive governance. Conservatives think they
have a better vision and better policies, and the proof can be found in how
life in Florida contrasts with life in California.
(The governor who conservatives think best represents the
Democrats is not the governor who Democrats think best represent Democrats. A
governor such as Jared Polis in Colorado, recently praised by George Will, stands out because of his
deviations from modern progressivism — he helped found charter schools and
supports school choice, he endorsed the conclusions of the Simpson–Bowles
deficit-reduction commission, he opposed a ballot initiate to create a state-run
universal-health-care system, and he was relatively modest in his enforcement
of pandemic restrictions.)
Barro thinks that Democrats would be insane to drop Biden
and nominate Newsom, because Biden is likeable and relatable, and the
California governor isn’t. But one aspect of that argument isn’t going to be
persuasive to those on the right: There are few conservatives who look at the
president and see “Relatable Joe from Scranton,” as Barro characterizes him.
Biden’s critics and even mainstream-media reporters have laid out how his
self-told tale of rising from humble beginnings was part of a carefully
contrived image.
For starters, Biden’s family moved to Delaware when he
was ten; the last time the president actually lived in Scranton, John F. Kennedy
was a newly elected senator. When the president talks about his youth, he
describes a modest working-class upbringing, with his parents struggling to pay the bills and having
to sacrifice things when the price of gasoline increased. The New York Times, in a 2008 profile,
suggested that Biden’s background would be more accurately described as
middle-class: “In those years the Bidens were neither rich nor poor. Mr.
Biden’s younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, said she always had as fine a
dress for school dances as her wealthier classmates at Ursuline Academy, the
Catholic girls’ school she attended. The difference, she said, was that her
parents bought them on layaway.”
Just last month, The New Yorker offered more details:
The anecdotes I heard about Biden’s
father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., told a different story. He was working at
a car dealership when his son was elected to the Senate, in 1972, but according
to Jimmy Biden, one of the President’s younger brothers, his father’s idea of
casual attire was a sport coat and an ascot. Biden, in his memoir, wrote about
opening a closet and finding his father’s polo mallet, equestrian boots, riding
breeches, and hunting pinks — items that suggested a past life of privilege. At
one point, Biden, Sr., had a lot of money, but he lost it all, for reasons that
went mostly unexplained. “I never asked him much about his life, and he didn’t
offer,” Biden wrote.
Biden repeatedly insists that his Senate colleagues
looked down on him for his lack of wealth and called him “Middle-Class Joe,”
saying things like, “It’s not meant to be a compliment. It means I’m not
sophisticated.” There’s no record of anyone calling Biden “Middle-Class Joe”
other than Joe Biden. By the time Biden was elected to the Senate, he
was making $44,600 per year, which is $267,935.63 in today’s
dollars. By 1977, he was making $57,500 per year, which is $281,020.34 in
today’s dollars. Biden’s belief that he is middle class reflects his
perspective of serving alongside multimillionaires, not his actual membership
in the middle class as it could be reasonably defined.
One of Biden’s big “relatable guy” schticks during his
Senate career was that he “took the train to work every day” when the Senate
was in session. But this wasn’t the subway or commuter rail; this was the
Acela, which was always among the most expensive options Amtrak offered. And
a lawmaker’s travel to and from his district is usually paid for out of
office funds.
In short, a lot of conservatives see Joe Biden as a
shameless phony. By that measure, Gavin Newsom is somewhat refreshing: He’s
wealthy and privileged, he’s always been wealthy and privileged, and he’s never
really pretended otherwise.
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