CalMatters reports:

Measured against the goal he set for himself, Newsom’s record is less impressive. Just 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built. He’s walked back the goal many times, settling on a new target earlier this year: Cities need to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. So, 1 million fewer homes planned for, not built, and over a longer time frame.

Newsom rejects controls on outdoor lighting!

Facts don’t matter!

The NY Times writes: A.B. 2382: Light pollution

This bill aiming to reduce light pollution would have required all outdoor lights on state properties to have anti-light pollution shields, as well as motion sensors or automatic dimming or shut-off functions to limit the amount of light they project.

Newsom said the costs associated with changing light requirements at 24,000 state buildings “may cost millions of dollars not accounted for in the budget.”

Assemblyman Alex Lee, who introduced the bill, called the veto “extremely disappointing.” “This bill would have protected our night skies and migratory species, while reducing wasteful and unnecessary electricity consumption,” Lee told The Los Angeles Times.

Evan Symon, of the California Globe, evaluates his chances. Symon writes:

But let’s push all of what he did back in. And look, I typed “Gavin Newsom controversies” into Google and got 909,000 pages back. When I was gathering links of what he had done just as Governor from the Globe’s archives, it looked like I was going into the Library of Congress. Even giving a highlight reel would still make for a small book. Suffice it to say that for every good or successful thing Newsom has backed, such as the Care not Cash program in San Francisco in the early 2000’s that replaced giving straight cash to the homeless for medical care and other health programs, there has been one other that had disastrous consequences, like extramarital affairs with wives of his own aides.

We showed another side of Con Not Cash in our 2016 post here.

Newsom’s policies for the unhoused are discussed in the Sacramento Bee here.

Newsom claims he is not running for President but…..

https://www.chron.com/politics/article/newsom-abortion-billboard-austin-17501560.php

Is Newsom too blah blah to be president?

We all know the campaign is coming, writes Eric Ting on SFGATE.

“When you were governor of California, you backed off of single-payer health care after you and the state Democratic Party received ungodly amounts of money from big insurance donors,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might say.

“Gavin Newsom simply cannot be trusted to enact progressive policies like Medicare for All,” Rep. Ro Khanna may add.

These are the same criticisms Warren and Booker faced in the 2020 primaries: Booker was called “a neoliberal who’s cozy with the monied elites of Wall Street and Silicon Valley” by The New Republic, and the progressive souring on Warren began in earnest after she equivocated on her support for Medicare for All.

Newsom has a history of being squishy on policy when it comes to the desires of moneyed interest groups, whether it be prison guards opposing a vaccine mandate or Hollywood lobbyists seeking exemptions from stay-at-home orders. He has also drawn progressive ire over his handling of fracking permits and the currently proposed gas rebate. Other presidential candidates running as progressives will have a remarkably easy time painting Newsom as a neoliberal establishment sellout; if you thought the Elizabeth Warren snake memes were harsh, wait until you see what the Bernie Sanders wing of the party might have in store for Newsom.

Would Newsom be better off running as a more centrist candidate in the mold of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar? The moderate wing of the Democratic Party heavily prioritizes electability, with Biden (Pennsylvania) Klobuchar (Minnesota) and Buttigieg (Indiana) all arguing to voters that their midwestern roots would help in critical swing states in the region, and that their policy moderation would not turn off independent or conservative voters. Newsom is the embodiment of a coastal elite, and is already a prominent Fox News boogeyman. 

In 2020, Buttigieg specifically went after Warren and Sanders for being vulnerable to Republican attacks that they are too far to the left, and similar attacks will likely be lobbed against Newsom when he runs.

Even if Newsom tries to make a heel-turn towards stylizing as a moderate, he’ll have a difficult time convincing centrist voters he’s for real after years of branding himself a trail-blazing progressive — a label that, again, progressives don’t agree with in the first place. Meanwhile, his high-profile inability to follow state and local COVID-19 rules cannot be written out of the public record, and it’s not hard to see moderate candidates such as Buttigieg, or perhaps Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, stating, “Our party is already accused of being out of touch with ordinary people, why in god’s name would we want to nominate the poster child of such criticism?”

When presidential candidates in the modern Democratic Party find themselves caught in no man’s land between the progressive lane and the establishment lane, bad things tend to happen. Booker never made it to the primaries. Warren never finished better than third place in any of the contests she ran in. Other candidates who straddled the line such as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand also saw their campaigns quickly fizzle. Going back further in time to 2016, Hillary Clinton had a stranglehold on the establishment wing while Bernie Sanders had a stranglehold on the progressive wing, leaving no room for any other serious contenders.

Newsom, who is not progressive enough for the left wing of the party and not electable enough for the centrist wing, is likely to suffer a similar fate whenever he launches the presidential bid everyone knows is coming.

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-needs-a-reality-check-17078264.php

“He’s also a bona fide environmentalist. In 2004 he rose to prominence by co-authoring an essay criticizing the green movement as arrogant and politically insular. “Environmentalism is just another special interest,” he wrote. “Environmentalists ask not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists.”

“He became an outspoken advocate for nuclear energy and shale gas fracking to reduce CO2 emissions. After writing a book criticizing climate alarmism, he turned his focus to the social policies that are ruining big cities on the West Coast, especially in California’s Bay Area where he has lived for three decades.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-shellenberger-beat-gavin-newsom-california-governor-gubernatorial-election-housing-energy-homelessness-school-choice-11652107572?mod=hp_opin_pos_2