OPINION:
Sure, he’s got time. He’s only 56 years old. If he were to run at President Biden’s age, he’d be a candidate in 2048.
But California Gov. Gavin Newsom is hot, hot, hot — and in this 24/7/365 news cycle, you can cool off real fast and die like an imploding star.
Think about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He got super hot back in 2011, so hot billionaire donors were begging him to get into the race. Republicans then were stuck with a dud of a candidate, Mitt Romney.
Mr. Christie did jump in for the 2016 race, but that didn’t last long. He launched his campaign in June 2015 but dropped out in February 2016 after pulling just 7.4% of the vote in New Hampshire.
And think again about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A year ago, he was supposedly a shoo-in for the Republican presidential nomination. One top politico privately told me that Mr. DeSantis is the smartest candidate for the White House since Lincoln, but we know how that ended.
Mr. DeSantis has imploded like a supernova. He has spent more time whining about Disney than laying out his vision for America. He decided to go hard right, losing more than half of the country.
Then, the same billionaires who were begging Mr. Christie to get in the 2012 race decided that they didn’t want to dump more money into Mr. DeSantis’ campaign. And New Hampshire voters, who have a disproportionate say in who wins the nod, just don’t like him.
“DeSantis began the year widely viewed as the Republican with the best chance to build a winning coalition against the former president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was also in many ways a continuation of Trump’s ’America First’ platform,” The Washington Post wrote on Monday.
“But” — there’s always a but — “DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, eroding on both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozens of early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.”
Back to Mr. Newsom. He’s quietly (and smartly so) running for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Don’t believe me? Mr. Newsom put together a hastily arranged trip to Israel last month, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then he popped over to China (remember, he’s governor of California, which isn’t exactly doing great lately, so maybe, stay there and fix things). There, he acknowledged that oddity and sounded exactly like a presidential candidate.
After a private conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping and a photo op shaking hands with the communist leader, Mr. Newsom said he brought up some of the hot-button issues between the U.S. and China. But he added that his visit “is suggestive that we’re entering, I hope, a new phase, and the fact that he’s meeting with a governor of California at the subnational level … is indicative of a thawing.”
Yeah, Mr. Xi is sharp. He knows you’re running for president.
And what appeared in my email inbox last week? A message from Mr. Newsom (how he got my email, I’ll never know).
“Last night, a gunman with a history of mental illness and easy access to a weapon of war walked into a bowling alley and a bar, shot and killed 18 people and injured 13 others,” he wrote to me. “The data is clear, and it is conclusive: states with strong gun laws — like California — have lower per-capita gun homicide and suicide rates. States with weak gun laws have higher gun homicide and suicide rates.”
Then, of course, he asked for money for his political action committee.
Mr. Newsom has also been bold in eschewing the far-left wing of his party and tacking back to the middle — where you need to be in 2024. He vetoed a bunch of bills sent to him by the progressive wing of the party in recent months and raised his foreign policy stature, which will no doubt loom large next November.
SFGate wrote a fawning piece even when Mr. Newsom ran over a kid during a basketball photo op. After his Xi meeting, “Newsom then transitions out of basketball-twirling with a fairly seamless behind-the-back dribble. Given that he’s 56 years old and, again, is in dress shoes, it’s hard not to be a little impressed. At the eight-second mark, he launches into a spin move, a combo that has taken out lesser defenders in NBA 2K online.” Then he crushed a kid.
The media hated former Vice President Al Gore. They mocked his “lock box,” his “earth tone” wardrobe, and even his lack of saxophone skills.
But not Mr. Newsom. He’s a protostar about to become a T-Tauri star, when his core temperature will rise high enough for nuclear fusion to commence.
Or, he’s a white dwarf, about to become a planetary nebula, like Mr. Christie and Mr. DeSantis. Only time will tell.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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