You Can't Just Say Things

Gavin Newsom’s attempt to thread the needle on LGBT rights continues to pay political dividends. Three weeks ago, I noted the brief fracas that our podcaster-in-chief’s throwaway comment about trans athletes had generated in the legislature. That all appears to have died down, but the larger fallout has gotten considerably worse.

Last week, President Trump threatened to withhold “large scale Federal Funding” from California if the state did not bar a AB Hernandez, a trans high school track athlete, from participating in track and field finals. He referenced Newsom’s own words in the Truth Social post announcing this decision: “The Governor, himself, said it is ‘UNFAIR,’” he wrote. “I will speak to him today to find out which way he wants to go???”

The California Interscholastic Federation (which is not a public entity and does not answer to the governor, for the record) responded by announcing that the cisgender girls who Hernandez beat out to qualify for the finals would also be allowed to compete — a decision seemingly calibrated to please no one. Trump’s political commissars at the Justice Department then opened an investigation into the state for allowing trans athletes to compete at all.

Hernandez was already a target of MAGA ire before the governor blundered into the middle of things; Charlie Kirk even mentioned her in the podcast conversation where Newsom set off this whole chain of events. It is quite possible that the president would have intervened like this even if the governor had stayed silent. But there’s little doubt that Newsom created an opening in his conversation with Kirk: not only did he box himself in on the issue of trans rights, he inadvertently helped right-wing demagogues raise the visibility and salience of the AB Hernandez story.

The most important thing about this whole sordid debacle is first and foremost that the president of the United States is using the full weight of the federal government to harass a single teenage girl, to the possible detriment of the country’s most populous state. But, as I suggested in my last post on the topic, Newsom’s role in all of this also illustrates, in a particularly extreme manner, some of the trouble with popularism.

You may recall that popularism, at its most basic level, is the proposition that Democratic candidates should express support for more popular policy positions and move away from less popular ones. That’s all fine so far as it goes: all else being equal, I would expect a candidate who supports some immigration restrictions to perform better than one who endorses the concept of open borders. But, as I mentioned in my last post, all else is not equal. Charisma matters, and politicians who are transparently thirsty for any positive attention they can get — e.g. Gov. Newsom — tend to lack charisma. Charismatic figures balance the need to meet voters where they are with the no less pressing need to project an “authentic” persona.

I covered all of that in my last post, but there’s another issue here: someone who already wields political power cannot campaign without simultaneously governing. When the governor of California speaks, he makes state policy; his words shape the legislative agenda and guide the work of executive branch departments. Anything he says in pursuit of higher office will directly or indirectly affect his stewardship of the government of California — which is still technically his full-time job, by the way. Newsom’s failure to understand this has helped usher California into a crisis.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I am not offering campaign advice. And I’m certainly not suggesting that base mobilization, absent any concessions to the center, is a surefire path to Democratic victory (though I have certain non-strategic reasons for thinking those deviations from progressive orthodoxy should not include dabbling in transphobia). As I’ve said before, I am not a campaign strategist, and I do not have strong opinions about the right campaign message for Democratic office seekers. I suspect the answer is largely contextual.

But I do have very strong opinions about what good governance looks like. And governing wisely and prudently, not chasing a promotion, is the primary obligation of anyone in elected office. That’s the core proposition of representative democracy, and it’s a solemn responsibility for anyone to take on.

Naturally, officeholders who understand the weight of that responsibility will watch what they say, because virtually all of their public utterances could be considered “governing” in one sense or another. In that sense, any current officeholders who wants to move in a popularist direction face a set of serious constraints: they can’t speak without considering both the substantive merits of their words and their effect back home.

Newsom appears to have forgotten that he cannot speak publicly in any voice other than the voice of California’s governor. At the very least, he’s failed to take that fact seriously. I don’t think it will be worth it for him.