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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. "Isn't this great?" he said. "I love this city!"





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