Fake Democrat Gavin Newsom Is Only Lt. Governor Now, But He Can Do A Lot Of Damage In The Future

Like Rick Perry, Gavin Newsom is certain new glasses make him look serious

Gavin Newsom presents well. When he still thought he was running for governor, he called a meeting of L.A. political bloggers in some sleek West Hollywood hotel and did a free-flowing Q and A. He was as sleek as the hotel and everyone swooned. Except me. Having recently exited the corporate world, Newsom's glitz and studied expertise in everything didn't impress me. Good hair, yes... but I could sense that guy at the head of the table was a quintessential Republican no matter what party label he wore and no matter San Francisco gay couples he had married. Jon Ward wasn't at that meeting, but he's got Newsom's number as well-- and he shared it this week at HuffPo-- The Right's Strange New Hero: Gavin Newsom.

After he was elected Lt Governor, Jerry Brown told him to keep out of his hair and go find some ribbons to cut. Instead he wrote a book, Citizenville, although I'm not certain if the proceeds are owned by the state government which was paying his salary while he wrote it. As Ward explains, "the ideas he espouses in the book have Washington conservatives sitting up and taking note." Like Newt Gingrich: "It is a tremendous book which I recommend all the time."

Ward's article goes well with the Tim Donovan piece at Salon we've been looking at, Clueless rich kids on the rise: How millennial aristocrats will destroy our future. Newsome was born in 1967, so he's not a millennial, just ahead of his time. And he isn't from a rich family, but a very politically connected one. He was appointed, rather than elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and when he ran he ran in the most Republican district in town-- Pacific Heights, the Marina and Sea Cliff-- and ran on both the Democratic and Republican slates. when people weren't thinking of him as just an opportunistic Republican calling himself a Democrat, he's just been considered a conservative and a part of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

His personal wealth-- he's a multimillionaire-- comes from his connections, particularly to oil heir Gordon Getty who was the primary investor in 10 businesses Newsom started, almost all of them bars, cafes and wine shops. And his policies are the policies that serve the interests of business rather than families. Citizenville is an anti-government screed that any Ayn Rand fan would happily recognize and, according to Ward, the "central premise is that government can be better, more relevant, more engaged with the public by embracing technology-- and getting out of the way." Newsom, channeling his inner Republican: "Government can do best by simply getting out of the way."

Newsom's critique of government’s failures and weaknesses dovetails with the narrative that some on the right are crafting to critique the Democratic Party and spark a revival of the moribund GOP. A loose coalition of thinkers-- including Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs magazine, and Alex Castellanos, a veteran political consultant working on rebranding the GOP-- have been busy promoting the idea of "reform conservatism."

Levin and Castellanos, in particular, are each working independently to craft a way of talking about conservatism that can change perceptions of the right, even among those Americans who don’t pay close attention to politics. It’s a significant ingredient in the GOP’s hopes for resurgence. Their argument is that liberalism is a top-down, antiquated approach to modern governance.

Devolving decision-making power and authority to local institutions is a better way, they say, to approach a technology-driven world that is increasingly complex, diverse and bottom-up.

Put more simply, they say Democrats are the party of old ideas, and conservatives-- who have struggled with being identified as the party of old, white men-- are actually the best fit for the future... Newsom’s steady cultivation of Silicon Valley moguls should help him raise funds for any statewide run.

If the gays want to marry and dopers want to smoke pot, he's all for that but high-speed rail-- investment in the future that will cost rich people money-- he's against it. Compare the fluffy bullshit and hype of Citizenville with the paper, Eliminating Extreme Inequality, Joe Stiglitz and Michael Doyle published for the Carnegie Council's Ethics And International Affairs and you can't help but see the contrast between the striving, self-serving huckster and the thoughtful problem solver.

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, UN member states took a dramatic step by putting people rather than states at the center of the UN’s agenda. In their Millennium Declaration, the assembled world leaders agreed to a set of breathtakingly broad goals touching on peace through development, the environment, human rights, the protection of the vulnerable, the special needs of Africa, and reforms of UN institutions. Particularly influential was the codification of the Declaration’s development related objectives, which emerged in the summer of 2001 as the now familiar eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be realized by 2015:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

• Halve the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger.

2. Achieve universal primary education.

• Ensure that all boys and girls complete primary school.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
• Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.

4. Reduce child mortality.

• Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under five.

5. Improve maternal health.
• Reduce by three-quarters the ratio of women dying in childbirth.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
• Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

7. Ensure environmental sustainability.

• Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
• By 2015, reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water.
• By 2020, achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

8. Develop a global partnership for development.
• Develop further an open trading and financial system that includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction-- nationally and internationally.

• Address the special needs of the least developed countries, and the special needs of landlocked and small island developing states.

• Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries.
• Develop decent and productive work for youth.

• In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.
• In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies-- especially information and communications technologies.

While the accomplishment of these goals would have been an impressive achievement, even taken together they do not represent a complete or comprehensive vision of human development. They were constrained by what the member states could agree upon in 2000 and, in particular, they lacked a vision of equitable development. As the international community thinks about the set of goals that will follow the MDGs, it is time to address that shortcoming by adding the goal of “eliminating extreme inequality” to the original eight... Extreme inequalities tend to hamper economic growth and undermine both political equality and social stability.

...Economists of widely differing philosophical outlooks agree that inequalities of incomes and assets have harmful economic effects. Increasing inequalities, with top-heavy income distributions, lessen aggregate demand (the rich tend to spend a smaller fraction of their income than the poor), which can slow economic growth. The attempt of monetary authorities to offset these effects can contribute to credit bubbles, and these bubbles in turn lead to economic instability. That is why inequality is often associated with economic instability. In this perspective, it is not a surprise that inequality reached high levels before the Great Recession of 2008 and before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recent International Monetary Fund research shows that high inequality is associated with shorter growth cycles.

Much of the inequality observed around the world is associated with rent-seeking (for example, the exercise of monopoly power), and such inequality manifestly undermines economic efficiency. But perhaps the worse dimension of inequality is inequality of opportunity, which is both the cause and consequence of inequality of outcomes, and causes economic inefficiency and reduced development, as large numbers of individuals are not able to live up to their potential. Countries with high inequality tend to invest less in public goods, such as infrastructure, technology, and education, which contribute to long-term economic prosperity and growth.

Reducing inequality, on the other hand, has clear economic as well as social benefits. It strengthens people’s sense that society is fair; improves social cohesion and mobility, making it more likely that more citizens live up to their potential; and broadens support for growth initiatives. Policies that aim for growth but ignore inequality may ultimately be self-defeating, whereas policies that decrease inequality by, for example, boosting employment and education have beneficial effects on the human capital that modern economies increasingly need.

Gaps between the rich and the poor are partly the result of economic forces, but equally, or even more, they are the result of public policy choices, such as taxation, the level of the minimum wage, and the amount invested in health care and education. This is why countries whose economic circumstances are otherwise similar can have markedly different levels of inequality. These inequalities in turn affect policy-making because even democratically-elected officials respond more attentively to the views of affluent constituents than they do to the views of poor people. The more that wealth is allowed unrestricted roles in funding elections, the more likely it is that economic inequality will get translated into political inequality.

...One of the most pernicious forms of inequality relates to inequality of opportunity, reflected in a lack of socioeconomic mobility, condemning those born into the bottom of the economic pyramid to almost surely remain there. Alan Krueger, former Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, has pointed to this link between inequality and opportunity. Inequality of income tends to be associated with less economic mobility and fewer opportunities across generations. The fact that those born into the bottom of the economic pyramid are condemned to never reach their potential reinforces the correlation between inequality and slower long-term economic growth.

I don't expect Newsom, who suffered from a severe learning disability in school, to ever understand this stuff on anything but the most superficial level. And who cares? All we need to care about is to make sure he never advances out of the harmless office he now holds as Lt. Governor.