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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector-http://www.knowledgeplex.org/news/47451.html GOING PLACES; An ambitious young mayor takes San Francisco. TAD FRIEND The New Yorker October 4, 2004 Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, began fighting City Hall almost as soon as he moved into it. He disliked ceremonial ribbon- cuttings and the way that Room 200, his imposing oak-panelled office, seemed to turn visitors into sycophants. So on Friday mornings and Sundays he started visiting troubled parts of the city on his own, without his usual two-man security detail. He talked to shopkeepers who had witnessed a murder in broad daylight in the Western Addition neighborhood, and shook hands with gang members at a housing project in blighted Bayview, introducing himself like a man still running for office: "Hi, guys, my name is Gavin Newsom and I work for you. Give me direction-what do you need?" Newsom, who is six feet two and has the look and slicked-back hair of a silent-screen actor, is, at thirty-six, the city's youngest mayor in more than a century. He has a knack for drawing attention to himself, and may already have generated more headlines than his predecessor, Willie Brown, a smooth-talking veteran of four decades in California politics. Since Newsom took office, in January, "60 Minutes" has done a segment on him; he has twice appeared on Charlie Rose's program; and Newsweek has touted him, along with Barack Obama, as one of five stars of the Democratic Party. One sunny morning in April, Newsom convened his department heads for a field trip, or "workday." They went to the Sunnydale projects, a hillside dotted with barracks-style apartments that sometimes provide cover in shooting wars between the Up the Hill gang and the Down the Hill gang. As the Mayor walked among the units, voicing his dismay, twenty-one officials and community activists trotted behind him, taking notes. "Do we like garbage on the lawn?" Newsom said. "No, we do not." And: "See all this broken glass? Kids can't play here-it's totally unacceptable." And: "No swings in the swing set, guys. Must. Get. Swings." His voice was gravelly, still raw from last fall's campaign. As the Mayor pointed out junked cars to be towed and a basketball court that badly needed grading, Sunnydale's residents fell in behind what had become a parade. "We never had a mayor come down this far-they don't want to go where the bullets fly and kids die," Regina Fontero, a security guard who has lived in Sunnydale for more than fifteen years, said in a loud voice. "But he's down in the trenches with his sleeves rolled up!" Standing on the sloping court, Newsom grinned at this unsolicited sound bite and mimed making a layup. At age seventeen, Newsom was drafted by the Texas Rangers, and though he opted for a partial baseball scholarship to college (where he blew out his left, or throwing, elbow), if he gets near a court he invariably tries to spark up a game. When he visited a reform school a few days later, a half-dozen sixteen-year-olds who'd been listlessly watching basketball on television filed outside after they saw the Mayor shooting baskets in the midday heat. He tossed them a ball. "I don't want to break an old man's ankle," one said. "Y'all in church shoes." "Church shoes!" Newsom repeated, considering his black oxfords with amusement. He sank a long jumper and looked over: "Church shoes!" After touring Sunnydale, Newsom returned to a store, the Little Village Market, whose bleak appearance had occasioned his complaints an hour earlier. He looked almost surprised to see that it was still standing. But for all the camera-ready showmanship of these appearances (Newsom usually has his white shirtsleeves rolled up and his favorite silver-and-blue rep tie loosened, just so), they are not simply for show. By the end of July, the Sunnydale basketball court had been repaved and given new nets, and swings were in place on the playground; within a month of Newsom's visit to Bayview, nearly a million dollars' worth of improvements had gone into its projects. Arelious Walker, who is seventy-three and a pastor at Bayview's True Hope Church of God in Christ, told me, "Our people are excited, because this mayor is acting for them, and they believe he's serious. Willie Brown was a nice mayor, but he never done like this mayor." Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, came into office after a runoff election in which he narrowly beat-and vastly outspent-the Green Party candidate. He was not expected to spend much time in the inner city. Newsom and his wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, a former assistant district attorney who is now an anchor on Court TV, have star quality, of the sort that recently inspired Harper's Bazaar to devote an eight-page photo spread to the couple and to call them "the new Kennedys." Newsom himself is a millionaire who owns cafes, a winery, clothing shops, and a resort hotel, all built with financial help from Gordon Getty, a close friend of Newsom's father, William A. Newsom. Getty, a billionaire heir to the J. Paul Getty oil fortune, used to include Gavin and his sister, Hilary, on Getty family vacations to watch whales in Canada and elephants in Kenya. "I think of Gavin as a son," Gordon Getty told me. The Mayor's mentors also include John L. Burton, the president pro tem of the California Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, who have invested in his businesses; California's senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer; and Willie Brown, who gave Newsom his start in politics when he appointed him to an open seat on the Board of Supervisors, in 1997. Tom Ammiano, one of several city supervisors whom Newsom defeated in what started out as a nine-candidate mayoral race, says, "He's a thirty-six-year-old golden boy with Getty money. There are large ambitions here-the Gettys, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein: they're thinking, President Newsom." When I asked Gordon Getty if he thinks about a Newsom Presidency, he replied, "Of course." When I asked Pelosi if she thought about it, she said, "I certainly do," adding that Newsom "has the leadership qualities" and also that "he's a very beautiful, lovely person." As mayor, Newsom showed up at homicide scenes as a way to goad the Police Department into improving its dismal rate of cleared murder cases-at thirty-one per cent, half the average rate for major American cities. He appointed the city's first female police chief and the country's first female big-city fire chief. Facing a three- hundred-and-seven-million-dollar budget deficit, a record, he cut his own salary by fifteen per cent and fired more than a thousand people from jobs he had identified as superfluous. Many of those let go had been hired by Willie Brown. Most surprising was a policy that drew attention far beyond San Francisco: in mid-February, Newsom directed the city clerk to begin marrying same-sex couples in defiance of the state statute that prohibits gay marriage-under the doubtful but audacious theory that the statute violated California's constitution. By the time the state's lower courts halted the proceedings twenty-nine days later, more than four thousand couples had got married in a "Winter of Love" that, many San Franciscans felt, restored the city to its onetime status as an avatar of social rebellion. (The glow from all this was dimmed on August 12th, when the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Mayor had overstepped his authority, and took the further step of nullifying all those marriages.) In early September, Newsom's approval rating stood at seventy-eight per cent, an astounding figure for the Bay Area, which often savages its leaders. (John Francis Shelley, a one-term mayor in the sixties, called the job "an endless, impossible, and exhausting drain.") It has been a giddy and often disorienting ride. Newsom still talks about his encounter with George W. Bush at a black-tie dinner in Washington in March, not long after Bush had called Newsom's marriage initiative "troubling" and Newsom had termed Bush's proposal for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage "cowardly" and "disgraceful." As Newsom recounted it, "Nancy Pelosi introduced us, and the President goes, 'Mister Mayor' "-Newsom slipped into a Bush impression, so it came out "Mistur Mare"-"and he goes on, 'That's the toughest job in politics, Mare.' I said, 'It can't be as tough as your job, Mr. President.' 'Well, probably only my job is tougher, eh-heh, eh-heh.' Someone said, 'He's the youngest mayor in history,' and the President puts his arm around me and says, 'I'm proud a you, I'm proud a you,' and then a minute later he looks back and says, 'I won't be travelling to San Francisco soon, eh-heh, eh-heh, eh-heh.' It was like watching a skit on 'Saturday Night Live,' with Bush laughing, the shoulders moving, everything. Then we all took a photo together and smiled. There seemed to be no animus, no recognition of the debate we'd just had. It was . . . odd." Newsom's admirers call him a natural, a Clinton without the neediness and excess, but the comparison doesn't quite hold up. For one thing, Newsom is weak at pageantry: he filibusters his allies, and he can be standoffish with strangers. At a press conference about banning assault weapons, when a mother whose son had been killed with an AK-47 broke down Newsom gave her a hand grip, then, belatedly, a cheek peck and sideways clasp. He has not mastered the bear hug of felt pain. Like Clinton, though, Newsom is something of a policy wonk-a favorite of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Al From, the D.L.C.'s founder and an early Clinton supporter, praises Newsom as "a new Democrat, a bright young star who's on top of the latest in the priorities-budgeting process." Newsom, who listens to his staff debate with his left forefinger alongside his temple, occasionally interjecting, "Interesting, interesting," does at times suggest that governance consists of constructing a dashboard of key performance indicators and then fiddling with the knobs. His wife calls him Rain Man for his habit of spouting statistics and quoting from such political self-help primers as "The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis." These volumes are usually close at hand, and bear the impress of his yellow highlighter, which he carries even to the pool and on vacation. As a child, Newsom was teased for being slow-witted and was finally given a diagnosis of dyslexia; he often reads material four or five times, trying to absorb it with the same frowning focus that he once brought to practicing free throws. Newsom's hero since boyhood has been Robert F. Kennedy-like Newsom, a wealthy Irish Catholic who became increasingly progressive; Newsom's friend Lori Puccinelli Stern recalls his insisting that she and her husband listen to tapes of Kennedy speeches when they drove to Lake Tahoe for the weekend-he seemed to require that they feel inspired. (Newsom's favorite was R.F.K.'s 1966 address at the University of Capetown, in which he said that the world "demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will.") Like Bobby Kennedy, Newsom sometimes makes decisions by responding to personal experience with sudden, almost religious conviction. That's how he explains what happened in January, when he attended the State of the Union speech as Pelosi's guest and heard Bush propose the constitutional amendment that would "defend the sanctity of marriage" by banning gay unions. As Newsom recalls it, he thought, He's attacking my citizens. Although none of Newsom's twenty-one campaign position papers mentioned gay marriage, when he returned to San Francisco he told his aides that he wanted to begin marrying same-sex couples as soon as possible. Members of his staff, a number of whom are gay, argued against the idea. They pointed out that the issue would alienate his supporters and distract people from his focus on Bayview; and that national Democratic leaders who had campaigned for him would see it as a betrayal-an embarrassment to the Party in an election year. Only Michael Farrah, Newsom's senior adviser and a groomsman at his wedding, kept quiet. When someone asked him why, he said, "Because the Mayor has already made up his mind." Pelosi, Feinstein, and Boxer strongly reinforced the aides' warnings. Pelosi says she told Newsom that Democrats had been working for more than two years on stopping the constitutional amendment, "and we don't want outside interventions that could change the dynamic." Another prominent Democrat said to the Mayor, "Are you on the payroll of Karl Rove?" The Mayor and his advisers chose Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, lesbian activists who had been together for fifty-one years, to be the first couple married at City Hall, on February 12th. A photograph of them in tears, leaning their heads together after being pronounced "spouses for life," appeared on the front page of the Chronicle and was picked up around the country; the image of the event became the event. "We wanted to make it about the people," Peter Ragone, Newsom's press secretary, says, "not let it be the usual 'B roll' of two gay men in the Castro with their hands in each other's chaps." Newsom didn't perform the ceremony himself, saying that he shouldn't be the focus, but the following day he did privately officiate at the marriages of his chief of staff and his director of public policy. The Mayor encouraged his brother-in-law, a filmmaker named Geoff Callan, to film staff meetings during this period; "Rush to the Civil Altar" should be out next year. Some saw Newsom's initiative as a shrewd tactic. "He had to come up with something to win back the left, otherwise he'd spend the next four years fighting off recall petitions," one Democratic veteran told me. But the prevailing view was that authorizing gay marriage was the opposite of a tactical move. "In any civil-rights struggle, gains are made by spectacular boldness, and Newsom was spectacularly bold," Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, says. The line of gay couples outside City Hall grew, and the local Cartier had to fly in additional wedding bands. Michael Farrah cancelled Valentine's Day plans that Saturday, and he and his girlfriend began performing weddings. "Everyone was crying," he says. "I was crying at the weddings of people I didn't even know. It was the most rewarding weekend I've had in ten years of working in government." As Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist inveighed against this "wildfire," and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned that the situation could easily lead to violence, and "the next thing we know there is injured or there is dead people," Newsom's lead was peacefully followed in New Paltz, New York; Sandoval County, New Mexico; and Multnomah County, Oregon. In addition, since May thousands of court-sanctioned gay marriages have taken place in Massachusetts. In less liberal precincts, however, Newsom became the object of enormous enmity. He received more than fourteen hundred death threats-for a time, his security detail grew to seven-and one privately commissioned poll found that, while he had instantly achieved the highest name recognition of any potential Democratic candidate for the 2006 California governor's race, a quarter of the state's Democratic voters had formed a negative opinion of him just as quickly. "To my base of support, it was just a hand grenade," Newsom told me. A half-dozen local pastors forbade Newsom to worship in their churches, and at the annual Hibernian Newman Club St. Patrick's Day lunch, a gathering of the city's Irish Catholic elite, he heard boos. At the Convention in Boston in late July, everyone from the secretary of state of West Virginia to the winner of an MTV essay contest was given an opportunity to address the delegates- everyone except Newsom. If there is an issue that polarizes San Francisco-a city that is equally proud of its liberalism and of its quality of life-it is what to do about the large homeless population, estimated at about eight thousand people; by my count one recent afternoon, there were thirty-three people living on United Nations Plaza within view of the mayor's office. The nearby fountain was blocked off because it had become a public toilet. Newsom's leading issue as a mayoral candidate was a proposal to move the homeless into specialized single-room-occupancy hotels, where they would receive in-house jobs and addiction counselling but would have their cash benefits cut from a maximum of four hundred and ten dollars a month to between fifty-nine and ninety-seven dollars; furthermore, their stipends would be reduced even if they refused a room. His plan, called Care Not Cash, was reviled by the city's homeless advocates, a powerful constituency. Though programs to replace benefits with services are now standard in cities such as New York and Chicago, attempts to adopt such a measure in San Francisco had wrecked the careers of Art Agnos and Frank M. Jordan, one-term mayors who served, respectively, from 1988 to 1992 and from 1992 to 1996. Willie Brown avoided the problem by declaring that homelessness simply "may not be solvable." Newsom decided to try. In 2002, after the plan was rejected by his fellow-supervisors, he managed to get a Care Not Cash proposition on the ballot, where it passed with sixty per cent of the vote. Many of the other mayoral candidates charged that Newsom was pandering to voters by, in effect, docking homeless people's stipends and then cutting off their traditional means of supplementing them. (Last fall, Newsom, as a supervisor, proposed a ballot measure that prohibited aggressive panhandling; it, too, passed with sixty per cent of the vote.) When he was elected mayor, Newsom got a chance to test these initiatives against the realities of San Francisco life. One Sunday in April, he disguised himself by putting on a baseball cap and walked around the Tenderloin, the grimy district near City Hall where every doorway seems to house a dozing figure. The next day, in his office, he threw a world-class tantrum. Why am I seeing filth and open-air drug deals? he asked. Where are the street sweepers? Where are the police officers? Newsom's tirade resulted in Tenderloin Scrubdown, a Department of Public Works initiative to flush the streets and sidewalks with water every day. But a few days before the May 3rd rollout of Care Not Cash two people from the Coalition on Homelessness showed up at 6 a.m. to film the operation. Trent Rhorer, the thirty-five-year-old executive director of the city's Department of Human Services, came to Room 200 that afternoon to warn the Mayor. "It's not going to play well," Rhorer said. "The D.P.W. guys were pretty firm: 'Wake up! It's cleaning time.' The point is it's a health hazard to have people lying in their own shit, but it's going to look like we were rousting homeless people under cover of darkness." "The frustration of being mayor," Newsom said, "is that you can't control thirty thousand employees' activities seven days a week. Is it the big trucks or the mini pressure cleaners?" "The big flushers." "See, that's not the vision I had in mind," Newsom said. "Let's temper the big trucks dumping water-am I going to see video of homeless people getting drowned?" Rhorer laughed. "It's not funny," Newsom said. "No," Rhorer said. "It's not funny." Newsom put a finger to his temple and said, "No other major city in America hands out as much cash, which is why all the Bay Area homeless come here-San Mateo gives fifty-eight dollars, Alameda twenty-five, and Chicago gives no dollars-but all we're doing is reinforcing failure. . . . Check day is when drug dealers come to town, emergency rooms are overwhelmed, there's a precipitous drop in shelter use. It's a vicious cycle of despair-a hundred and sixty- nine homeless people died in this city last year. . . . The work requirement is nothing-you can work at the Coalition on Homelessness, protesting the same people who are giving you money-" "Do you know how many times I've heard this spiel?" Rhorer said, good-naturedly. "We have two hundred and ninety-nine beds that open up for homeless people on Monday, with counselling, the part I'm so proud of," Newsom continued, "and we'll have nine hundred and forty by the end of the year. I'd like to get that up to a thousand, by the way, Trent." He had been slumped with fatigue when Rhorer arrived, but now he was ripping through his trademark semaphores: hands in front of his chest, gripping the problem as if it were a basketball; hands revolving around each other to underline the complexities; hands swivelling left and right to show options; finger pointed back at himself to indicate the tough decision and the criticism he would take; fingers steepled in front of his chest to announce his ability to sleep at night. "It's the one issue that's gotten me in trouble," he concluded, forgetting for the moment about all the other issues. Some believe that Newsom is using Care Not Cash to advance his career. Supervisor Chris Daly, a former activist for the homeless, says, "Care Not Cash polled well, and that was the point where Gavin Newsom the supervisor became Gavin Newsom the mayoral candidate." Newsom, who says, "There was no polling!," acts as if he can't quite believe that anyone would question his motives. He was pleased that his outreach to the city's poorest citizens seemed to be paying off- and also that more than two months had gone by without a gang killing (until one in late August). But he couldn't help revisiting what happened after he met privately with fifteen gang members, most of them from the Sunnydale projects. "I've got my Ph.D. in homelessness and now I'm getting my Ph.D. in crime. I'm a sponge on this issue," Newsom told me. "But the community activists there-the same activists who walked with me through Sunnydale-are outraged because I'm meeting with the people directly. They say they're 'done with' me. I'm totally starting to get it, why things don't change. It's the death-by-a-thousand-cuts analogy. Like so many politicians, you find yourself thinking, I'm creating more enemies than friends! I'm going nowhere! Maybe I should just forget about it and run for reelection!" To Rhorer, Newsom now said, "The advocates say, 'You're taking money away from poor people.' " "And choice," Rhorer said. "Yeah, the paternalistic argument. But this is a choice I'm willing to make. You know, all the lawsuits and death threats and 'Don't show up at home' messages and the homeless-advocate people lighting couches on fire in front of my house-" "In meetings I've been called 'motherfucker' and 'fag,' " Rhorer put in. "Vicious, personal stuff-'How much did your wife pay for her wedding dress?' " " 'Nazi,' " Rhorer added, nostalgically. "It's inevitable that someone will slip through the cracks and be out on the street, and then it'll be on the front page-but I don't want it to be inevitable!" Newsom cried. "Trent, don't let me down!" A day later, Newsom had recovered his equipoise. When a Chronicle reporter told him that she was working on a story about the homeless in the Tenderloin, he predicted, "You're going to come back in a month and it's going to be"-he adopted the caramel tones of a local news correspondent-" 'Neighbors said, "We were optimistic about the new mayor, but it's the same old story: promises not kept." The Mayor responds by saying, "We did our best, but budget problems prevented us from . . ." KRON 4 sent an undercover team, and we discovered . . .' " Newsom's aides were cracking up. He grinned, then added quietly, in his own voice, "Hey. All I can say is we're trying." In the months since then, the city's homeless caseload has dropped by almost fifty per cent-bearing out Newsom's argument and, for now, nearly silencing his critics. Newsom's parents, Bill and Tessa, separated when he was two, and although they remained close friends, Gavin and Hilary grew up shuttling between their parents' worlds. A lawyer who always wished he'd become a poet, Bill Newsom ran losing campaigns for San Francisco supervisor and state senator and was later appointed to the state Court of Appeals by Governor Jerry Brown. "You were baptized a Democrat in my house," Bill Newsom told me. He recalls teasing his teen-age son, asking him, "Why are you so square? Why don't you use narcotics?" Though he never earned more than sixty-five thousand dollars a year while his children were growing up, Newsom's father introduced Gavin to the allure of money by showing him what life was like among the Gettys. Bill Newsom got to know Gordon Getty and his brother, Paul, at St. Ignatius, a Catholic prep school, and he later became a trustee of Gordon's fortune. In 1973, Bill flew to Italy on the Getty family's behalf to deliver a three-million-dollar ransom to Calabrian mobsters in exchange for the return of Gordon's nephew, J. Paul Getty III. Tessa Newsom, meanwhile, was holding three jobs to pay the rent, including taking shifts as a waitress at Ramona's, a Mexican restaurant where Gavin worked as a busboy. At home, Newsom says, "when I'd drop the garbage outside the door she would show me the right way of putting it inside the can and putting the lid on: 'Halfway is no way.' She'd say, 'It's not me serving you, young man-we're all in this family together.' " When Newsom graduated from the Jesuit-run Santa Clara University, he told his father that he wanted to study law. Bill Newsom, worried that his son's dyslexia would hurt him in law school, and seeing that Gavin possessed both charm and a capacity for hard work, steered him toward business instead. With a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars in seed money contributed by family friends, including fifteen thousand dollars invested by Gordon Getty, Newsom and Getty's son Billy opened the PlumpJack Wines shop in San Francisco's Cow Hollow. Newsom painted "Since 1992" on the side of the building when they opened, convinced that the store would endure until the date conveyed a sense of tradition. PlumpJack Group now manages ten other businesses. (On becoming mayor, Newsom sold his San Francisco-based holdings.) Newsom's opponents have long portrayed him as "uncaring" and "out of touch"-political code words for "so much richer than you and me"-and a Chronicle investigation in early 2003 fuelled this impression when it revealed the extent of the Mayor's financial ties to Gordon Getty. The paper noted that Getty or his family had invested in ten of Newsom's eleven enterprises; that he owned forty-nine per cent of PlumpJack Group; that he had picked up the bill for Newsom's wedding reception, which came to two hundred and thirty thousand dollars; and that he had acted as Newsom's banker for more than $1.5 million in home mortgages. Even the name "PlumpJack" comes from an opera that Getty wrote. Yet Newsom is galled by the lingering belief, in some voters' minds, that he's simply a front man for Getty's interests. "That first business, it was me sweeping the sidewalk, me sacrificing everything and working seven days a week," he says. "My name is Newsom, not Getty." Neither of Newsom's parents wanted him to run for mayor. "My dad was worried I'd lose, and my mother was worried I'd win," Newsom says. In 2002, Tessa Newsom, although she was mortally ill with breast cancer, kept coaxing her son to redirect his mayoral ambitions into buying the Marina Times, a tiny San Francisco neighborhood paper. "She was concerned for my wife's and my relationship," Newsom says, "and even as I held her hand as she was taking her last breath . . ." He blinked, suddenly unable to speak. "Gavin's mother was a strong woman and she lives inside of him," his aide Joyce Newstat says. "He's not threatened by powerful women-he prefers them to men." Newsom and Kimberly Guilfoyle met at the PlumpJack Cafe at a political event for State Senator John Burton, and began dating, in 2000, after she wrote him a five-hundred-dollar check for his reelection campaign as a supervisor and he replied with a warm thank-you note. Her job at Court TV requires her to live in New York (she flies home every other weekend), and inevitably the couple is the focus of intense local gossip, which Guilfoyle Newsom likens to the speculation surrounding Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Although Guilfoyle Newsom was one of the prosecutors who won a conviction in San Francisco's notorious 2002 dog-mauling murder case, people often prefer to talk about her stint as a lingerie model-just as they find her husband's ideas about urban renewal less worthy of discussion than the tidbit that he once dated Jewel. The photo spread accompanying the Harper's Bazaar article-the Newsoms posed in evening wear, lolling on Gordon Getty's rug-did little to allay the perception that the couple enjoy the spectacle of their success. Guilfoyle Newsom rounds on anyone who slights her husband or questions their long-distance relationship-"How's your marriage?" she'll say. For his part, Newsom tapes her show, freezes on rookie- mistake moments, and points them out to her: "Too much smile there," he might say. Last year, he urged her to run for district attorney, and she replied, "They'll say, 'Wait a second-too much power on one mattress.' " He said, "If you wanted to run, I wouldn't." "I said, 'No, you do it,' " Guilfoyle Newsom told me, quickly adding, "I would never rule it out in the future." Their home-and-job conflicts do take a toll. Guilfoyle Newsom says she has cooked dinner for her husband three times, and each time she wound up alone with cold food. They sold their house in Pacific Heights in January, but haven't had time to find a new one, so Newsom lives in a sublet apartment, in which the only individual touches are his suits and ties, his briefcase, his cell phone and charger, and a few bottles of Orangina. "He isn't going to have a personal life," Guilfoyle Newsom says with a rueful smile. "If San Francisco were a woman, he would have married her." Although Newsom prides himself on bringing about dramatic change, the truth is that his battles may not be resolved for years, after they have wended their way through the courts. The state Supreme Court ruling on the city's gay marriages was a sharp setback, although Newsom insists that he had expected it. At his direction, San Francisco had already filed a lawsuit claiming that the California statute prohibiting gay marriage is unconstitutional; the question will probably reach the state Supreme Court in about eighteen months. Having pored over the justices' earlier rulings, Newsom told me, "I am convinced that we will prevail by a four-to- three decision-I feel very confident." In the meantime, he has written fund-raising letters for a campaign by California Assemblyman Mark Leno to introduce legislation, this December, authorizing gay marriage. Although neither effort is assured of success, when it comes to social attitudes time appears to be on Newsom's side. "I fully expect gay marriage will be accepted in California in ten to fifteen years, just on the replacement of age cohorts," Mark DiCamillo, the director of the state's Field poll, says. If Newsom served two terms as mayor, he would be only forty-five, and might well then be seen as a pioneer by California-or even national-voters. In 1998, Newsom told the City Hall reporter Rachel Gordon, "If you're in politics and you want to make an impact, you should be as successful as possible, and the most influential position is President." Gordon says, "I got a call from his aide Mike Farrah afterward, saying, 'You're not going to use that, are you?' And Newsom has told me that that's a comment he still regrets making." She adds, "When he was a supervisor, he'd come down to the press room and shoot the breeze, talk about his dyslexia, about how his mom was dying. But he doesn't discuss his feelings anymore-he doesn't stray from message." Recently, when Newsom was passing through a hallway lined with portraits of the forty-one mayors who preceded him, he suddenly stopped and pointed to Washington Bartlett, a mutton-chopped figure who was mayor from 1882 to 1886. "Who's this? Why was he important?" he asked a nearby intern, who froze. "I'm just kidding," Newsom said. "That's the thing about mayors-you go up on the wall and ten years later no one knows who you were." One Saturday not long ago, I asked Newsom about his ambitions. I had spent the day with him in La Honda, about forty miles south of San Francisco. The city comptroller had suggested selling some land that the city owned there to help close the deficit, and Newsom wanted to see the parcel first. Instead, he spent his entire four-hour visit inspecting a city-run reform school on the land, and growing increasingly upset at its slovenly state and at his guide for the day, the city's chief juvenile probation officer, Gwendolyn Tucker. (In August, he announced that he was looking for Tucker's replacement.) After his driver returned him to City Hall, where he faced three hours of budget meetings, Newsom sat for a moment in the back seat and, in response to my question, said, "I've never for one second indulged in any consideration outside of being mayor." He grinned, and continued, "I have a hard time telling you this with a straight face. I would never believe me if I read this-I would go, 'That's bullshit.' " Jerry Brown, the two-term California governor and former Presidential candidate who is now the mayor of Oakland, understands the temptations. "I used to say I'd serve one term," he told me recently. "We all say that. But you don't run unless you've got a lot of ambition, and the more you do it the less you can do without it. I'm sure Gavin has no limits to his ambition, and so you run until they throw you out or carry you out." Brown recently announced that he plans to run for state attorney general. Newsom continued, "But I'll tell you, I think it would be interesting to announce that I will not run again, so that people will believe again in politicians and politics, will feel that this job matters, that it's not about me. I swear to you, I could give this job up easily. Easily. I think about owning a football team, about joining the Peace Corps to dig wells and educate in East Africa-even about working out every day so I could play one inning for the Giants. The reason I know there's life outside politics is because I've seen what life inside politics is like, and it ain't- why am I saying 'ain't'? Got to work on that-it's just not all it's cracked up to be. I can't keep up the pace. I don't have time to read. Last night I ate takeout lamb shank so late I couldn't even get to sleep. Politics is lifeconsuming, but it's not a life." After a moment, he went on: "Then yesterday, when all my staff were in a room, I thought, But if I quit, what happens to these guys? They're all fired. And if you quit you're a lame duck, so you want to be reelected to be able to use your leverage to get things done, that's true. That's true." Newsom continued the debate internally for a while, then rolled down the window and seemed to enjoy the thump of a rock band that was playing on the plaza opposite City Hall. A suspiciously serene rally in favor of legalizing marijuana was going on, and the air was suddenly pungent with the substance in question. 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