Gavin Newsom’s rebrand is DOA

Recently, Newsom has undergone cosmetic surgery for his brand. Newsom spent years presenting himself as one of the faces of the progressive movement, but President Donald Trump’s dispatching of fellow Golden State liberal Kamala Harris persuaded Newsom that to act on his well-established ambitions in 2028, he would need to ditch the unpopular agenda that doomed Harris. 

Former President Joe Biden governed to the left of where he had run in 2020, when Harris had run to his left. In 2024, the country roundly rejected the Biden-Harris legacy, and Newsom, with his finger perpetually suspended in the air to discern the direction of the wind, quite rightly sensed that to make it out of the wilderness, he would have to recalibrate.

The theory is sound, but Newsom’s Kinsley gaffe, or mistaken telling of the truth, was to articulate it so ham-handedly...