I don’t care if Gavin Newsom has personal flaws…who doesn’t? I don’t care if he’s fucked up here and there. I don’t care if he was complicit in allowing San Francisco to become the leading American poop-on-the-sidewalks city….a city in which unchallenged shoplifting and breaking into parked cars became an accepted thing. And I don’t care if he seems hollow, or even if he is hollow to a certain extent.
I certainly don’t approve of Newsom’s views on gender-affirming care, which he needs to evolve out of. But being a tap-dancer, he probably will.
What I do care about is that Newsom is more or less sane, and that he’s standing up against Trump in various showboating, muscle-car ways…I care that a big-state governor is flat-out calling Trump a bad guy and defying his ass and telling him to go eff himself. Because Newsom believes in and stands for, at the very least, a pre-Trumpian sense of decency and constitutional normality and proportionality…he supports a pretty good semblance of representative democracy, and that really matters. He leans left but is primarily a skillful tap-dancer…he’s mainly fluid and adaptable…he blows with the wind, and that’s all you can expect of a clever politician these days.
I would much rather see him move into the Oval Office on 1.20.29 than J.D. Vance…c’mon.
This just-announced executive order from Chicago’s mayor is, I believe, at least partly inspired by Newsom’s defiance. And that’s a good thing. Newsom may have started something.
