Gavin Newsom Is Getting Desperate Over California’s ‘Image Problem’
California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to run for president, but the state of California is a hindrance to that. So, instead of solving the plentiful problems afflicting the once-golden state, Newsom is seeking to fund a $19 million “California Brand Campaign” that would argue on a national level that California “is an economic powerhouse.”
The campaign is supposed to show the “reality” of California that is “obscured by negative narratives amplified online and in partisan media.”
The state government has called for interested contractors to develop a plan for “paid, social, and any other digital content.” Videos, the government said, can be “optimized for social media” or “designed for owned state channels, presentations, or events.”
This reeks of desperation. Newsom, seeing how much of a problem California’s “brand perception” is for his presidential campaign, is hiring out people to make TikTok videos for him — on the state’s dime.
Many are quickly seeing this project for exactly what it is.
Steve Maviglio, a Democratic political strategist who is a longtime Newsom critic, pointed out that the contract only lasts until the end of this year, when Newsom will be finishing up his term as governor.
“That just says all you need to know about this,” Maviglio told Fox 40. “It’s not so much about helping California businesses, it’s about trying to prop up Newsom’s unfavorability as he runs around the country.”
Republican state Sen. Roger Niello, meanwhile, told KCRA, “This is unquestionably promoting Gavin Newsom, this is unquestionably part of his presidential campaign.”
Newsom must be getting concerned because California’s woes have been a shadow hanging over his fledgling presidential campaign. Interviewers, such as CNN’s Dana Bash, feel obligated to confront him over it.
Last month, Bash, while interviewing Newsom about his memoir, told him, “California has the highest cost of living in the nation. The state’s prices are 11 percent higher than the national average. We were actually out to dinner here in Nashville last night. We met a couple from California. They moved out of California because they couldn’t afford the rent or even to buy a home and also to start a family.”
Inconveniently for Newsom, California’s most pressing problem, its cost-of-living crisis, directly runs up against the new priority Democrats are trying to center ahead of this November’s midterms: affordability.
Forbes found last year that the cost of a median home in California is nearly double the national average, at $906,500. That puts buying a home nearly out of reach for middle-class families. Karl Rove noted in the Wall Street Journal last month that U.S. News & World Report has ranked California at “No. 32 on its economy, 42 on fiscal stability, 45 on growth, 46 on employment, and dead last for opportunity.” The Bureau of Economic Analysis has found that California has the highest cost of living in the nation. The Census Bureau has said that California has the nation’s highest poverty rate, when accounting for living costs. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 5.6 percent.
Despite this, Newsom has chosen to tout California’s “affordability.” During his state of the state address this January, he said, “Affordability — that’s not a word we just discovered, and it’s certainly not a hoax. Here’s the way we think about it. It’s not just one issue; it’s a stacking of many issues, one on top of another.” He went on to claim that through “targeted tax credits, rebates, and program expansions, the average California family now saves $18,000.” The state write-up of his speech said he was “boldly investing” in “affordability.”
Newsom has also chosen to emphasize California’s immense wealth to distract from the dismal economic situation of its poor and middle-class residents.
When in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, Newsom was asked, “How are voters looking at California, looking at New York, looking at Chicago, supposed to say, ‘Yeah, this is the model that we want’?” Newsom set California’s cost of living crisis to the side and responded, “We have more Fortune 500 companies than any other state in America. More scientists, engineers, more Nobel laureates in my state than any state in America, the finest system of higher public education in the world. We have 18 percent of the world’s R&D — China, 22 percent; Germany, 21 percent; California, 18 percent of the world’s R&D. We’re the center of the universe as it relates to AI.”
One might wonder if California’s wealth, particularly given its progressive governance, actually makes the plight of its lower classes look even worse.
Criticism of California certainly hasn’t come from only, as the document outlining Newsom’s “brand campaign” claims, “partisan media.” Earlier this year, the Atlantic published an op-ed headlined “Gavin Newsom’s Record Is a Problem.” The piece said Newsom’s record “not only raises pressing questions about how effectively he could govern as president; it also provides opponents an endless buffet of vulnerabilities across social and economic issues.”
And CalMatters’ Dan Walters this January outlined the many issues that afflict California: “high levels of homelessness and poverty, a housing shortage that’s just as acute as when he took office in 2019, an insurance crisis born of chronic wildfires, a woebegone bullet train project, soaring costs of living, persistent water supply uncertainties and a looming shortage of gasoline as refineries close due to hostile state regulation.” Walters stated, “California’s urgent issues loom over Newsom campaign.”
Newsom must be bitter over all of this and fretting about how he can campaign for president when his life’s work is (perceived by many to be) a dumpster fire.
We can really see this bitterness in what the state government tells potential contractors for the California “brand campaign” project: “Some look at this state and try to tear down our progress. They attack our values and caricature our culture. They distort the data to diminish our accomplishments.”
Newsom can try all he wants to, as Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland said, to “put[] lipstick on a pig,” but the numbers don’t lie, and Newsom won’t be able to escape them on the campaign trail.
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