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Newsom Practically Demands to Be the Democratic Candidate
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s PR team has been planning this week for months. This is the week that three publications, Vogue, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, were given the go-ahead to publish splashy profiles of Newsom that reveal details from his memoir, which is set to be published later this month. The three publications were offered personal interviews, staged photoshoots, early access to his memoir, and, in two cases, interviews with his family members.
All of this makes Newsom’s rise to the top of the Democratic field look like the outcome of a meticulously managed effort to make his candidacy seem inevitable, rather than the result of organic momentum.
Newsom is not — as his book would like to portray — a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but rather a political product who has the whole establishment class working in lockstep to choreograph his presidential rise. It’s the same story today as it was when Willie Brown and John Burton and Gordon Getty and the whole San Francisco political class handed him his position as mayor of San Francisco and groomed him to rise even further in politics.
In his PR team’s effort to tightly control the governor’s image and promote this narrative of inevitability, they selected writers who would fawn over Newsom in breathless fashion. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s Democrat Fangirls)
Just look at how much of a joke the Vogue profile is.
Titled “Gavin Newsom Is Setting His Own Rules,” the article begins by calling the governor “embarrassingly handsome.” Could there be a more embarrassing way to begin a piece?:
Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address.
That was a lot. But it truly gets worse the longer the piece goes on:
It must drive Trump nuts. Newsom: lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque.
Argh! What is this? This must be satire, a joke to see how far the Democratic establishment class can go in demanding that Newsom be selected as the presidential candidate.
This goes on in just as ridiculous a fashion. We learn Newsom has an “executive strut.” That he is a “self-made millionaire” (he really isn’t). That his tone is “temperate.” He is at one point described in a single sentence as “Immaculate.” Soon thereafter, he is described as — and I’m not entirely sure what this means — “Fantastic at gab, like a windup doll.” We are also treated to this lovely description: “As he spoke, late-summer sun slanted in through the windows, bathing Newsom in an oh so California magic-hour glow.” (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Plots Memoir to Recast Personal Scandals)
There are more physical descriptions of the 58-year-old governor. He has a “lanky frame.” The writer, Maya Singer, thinks he looks perfect everywhere, too: “If Newsom has been spotted disheveled in public, show me the proof.”
This is made all the worse by the fact that the piece is interspersed with model shots of Newsom taken by Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who’s supposed to be the best at capturing the softness of a person’s visage. The piece also includes long excerpts from Newsom’s interviews with the writer, but it’s clear she thinks that’s all way less interesting than describing him as “lithe” and “lanky.”
I couldn’t help but notice that the New Yorker’s usually hard paywall is absent on the article, allowing its impact to be much wider.
The New Yorker piece pretends to be more serious, but it’s just as in love with Newsom. It tries to argue that Newsom is an exceptionally talented politician and also seeks to provide a defense of his past bad behavior. I couldn’t help but notice that the New Yorker’s usually hard paywall is absent on the article, allowing its impact to be much wider.
The article describes the governor as “one of the Democrats’ best hopes for pulling together a shattered country.” Its physical descriptions of the governor are only slightly more restrained than Vogue: “He was dressed in a white shirt, dusky-blue suit trousers, and a blue tie knotted, with two crisp dimples, into a four-in-hand.” He is “coiffed” and “has cultivated the air of an accidental politician.”
The article quotes one of Newsom’s megadonors, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, without noting the monetary relationship: “He understands that California is one of the leading places for the U.S. to try to compete with China.”
There are several unique anecdotes featured in the New Yorker article, showing the extent of access the writer was provided in exchange for this fawning profile. In one episode, Newsom is described as dreamily wishing to have spent more time on self-study of the liberal arts than on reading policy all day. “How many books I could have read!” exclaims Newsom. “Literature! Philosophy! I think about my life, honestly. I could have gone through the Library of Congress. I could have been someone! I could have wisdom!”
Further on in this window into Newsom’s daily life that the New Yorker writer has been afforded, the governor starts spouting allusions to the Walt Whitman poem “O Me! O Life!” The New Yorker writer then features Newsom quoting Walt Whitman later that night in his victory speech, celebrating the passage of his ballot proposition allowing California to gerrymander its districts. In this way, Newsom’s quoting of Whitman comes across as a supposedly organic and brilliant use of literature: “My call tonight, in the spirit of Whitman, who talked about ‘the powerful play goes on’ — we all must contribute a verse,” said Newsom.
Newsom’s sister, Hilary, was evidently dispatched to the New Yorker writer to explain the governor’s marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle. She simply says regarding the marriage, “Oh, God,” before going on to explain that Newsom’s heart was “locked” because of their mother’s illness during this time.
In the New Yorker piece, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Newsom’s wife, becomes the antidote to the problems that led Newsom to drink heavily and have an affair with a married mother. Siebel Newsom, it is stated, allowed Newsom to “express himself.”
The New York Times piece serves to pump up Newsom’s narrative that his success is not due, as I contend in my own biography of Newsom, to his family’s connections and his role in San Francisco’s high society. “Mr. Newsom emphasizes in his memoir, through various anecdotes, that it was his work ethic that led to success in sports, business and politics,” says the Times piece. “But he does not deny that his father’s friends were helpful along the way.”
The article, to its credit, notes that Newsom refused to discuss in his book his relationship with a 19-year-old when he was 38 and San Francisco’s mayor, which is something that I cover at length in my own book on Newsom. The governor’s defense of the relationship that he provides to the New York Times is: “That one was always colored in as something that it wasn’t.”
This week, Newsom also made a showy announcement that his book tour — essentially his shadow presidential campaign — will kick off in red states. In doing so, Newsom is sending the message that he believes his presidential campaign can win the electoral votes of states that have been going to Republicans.
His political adviser, Lindsey Cobia, told Politico: “It is very much on purpose to not start with the typical New York, DC, Philly stops…. We are being quite intentional in going into red states first.”
Newsom’s first stop will be in Nashville, Tennessee, and will be followed by events in Atlanta, Georgia, and Rock Hill, South Carolina.
By carefully orchestrating himself as the inevitable candidate nearly three full years before the presidential election, Newsom runs the risk of peaking too soon. It might be hard for organic momentum to grow around him when it feels like allegiance to him is being demanded.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes:
Newsom Confesses His Disturbing Role in the Euthanization of His Mother
Gavin Newsom’s ‘Self-Puffery’ Gets Him in Trouble With David Axelrod
An AI Bubble Could Pop Newsom
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