There is a slick new front man for the Democrat party.  Though nominally the governor of America’s most populous state, he has been running a national campaign for several years now.  (Recall his many attacks on successful across-the-country Florida and rival Governor Ron DeSantis.)

Glib and sounding intelligent while saying little of substance, Gavin Newsom is essentially a taller, whiter, and less cunning version of Barack Obama.

Gavin is not the electoral bantamweight many conservatives claim.  At 6’4” with heavily moussed hair, Gavin will be taller and at least as well coiffed and youthful-looking as his GOP opponent.  (Although it sounds shallow to highlight Gavin’s physiognomy, let’s acknowledge that an electorate shallow enough to elect Obama and Biden is also capable of electing Gavin.)

The entitled blueblood of the Getty and Pelosi dynasties aced finishing school; politically speaking, Gavin knows the difference between the soup spoon and the dessert spoon (both silver, of course).  With Hollywood, Big Tech, and the billionaire class bankrolling his campaign, Gavin will easily pull in more than $2 billion, likely outraising his small-dollar GOP opponent.

Yet Gavin is also as plastic, phony, and vapid as your typical Hollywood starlet.  Nearly androgynous in his effeminacy, he regularly indulges in Shiva-like gesticulations, manic interviews, and deeply disconcerting social media postings while projecting painfully forced empathy.

These attributes are appealing to blue women who instinctively recoil from masculine men like Trump and J.D. Vance.  Blue women are a voting bloc increasingly inclined toward outright misandry, possibly because they resent and despise their own fathers or feel rejected by other strong male figures they have encountered in their lives.  The oleaginous Gavin is the opposite of macho.

Unlike the senile Biden, Gavin won’t fall on his face while debating Vance or Gabbard or whomever the GOP ultimately nominates.  Plus it will obviously be the usual corporate media worms and fangirls asking the debate questions.

To overcome the stigma of being a white male at the top of the (D) ticket, Gavin’s V.P. will definitely be a woman.  Gretchen Whitmer is a good bet and might cement Michigan’s 15 electoral votes.  But Gavin could opt for a black or Hispanic woman to be truly intersectional and appeal to the highest number of grievance groups.

Gavin is a cinch to hold the blue states won by the inept Kamala Harris (226 electoral votes).  If he can then pick off the traditional blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — or even just PA and MI while winning back purple Arizona — the White House is his.

Gavin would then nominate an avenging attorney general along the lines of Keith Ellison, Marc Elias, or Andrew Weissmann.  SCOTUS judges might be on the order of the homicidal Jay Jones or James Boasberg.

Downplaying his silver spoon, the hipster Gavin claims to have been a scrappy underdog during his formative years, subsisting on Wonder Bread and mac ’n’ cheese.  (“It was about payin’ the bills, man! That’s how I grew up, bro!”)

Gavin once landed a hottie wife, named Kimberly Guilfoyle.  Later, like countless politicians, Gavin succumbed to extra-testicular activity — not by shagging some random groupie, but rather by bedding the wife of his own campaign manager and close friend, making the adulterous tryst a double-betrayal.

Of course, laws and morals are for Republicans and don’t apply to elites like Gavin and his friends.

Gavin’s current gamine of a wife and potential FLOTUS, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, testified to an affair with Harvey Weinstein, doubtless a painful experience for her.  She divulged the affair only after the #MeToo movement made headlines.

It’s worth noting that Gavin’s high-speed rail to nowhere in California’s central valley has cost $135 billion to date.  We’re not just talking about taxpayer money from daffy Californians micro-dosing on mushrooms and dreaming of unicorns but also working-class red-state voters whose federal taxes disappear into California’s gaping maw.  (Red tax dollars are always financing Democrat projects and underwriting graft and political corruption in blue states.)

Gavin’s predecessor as governor, Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, left California with a budget surplus just as Gavin assumed office in 2019.  After squandering Moonbeam’s surplus, Gavin and the Democrat supermajority Legislature in Sacramento now show annual budget shortfalls of at least $20 billion, though realistic estimates are far more dire.

By the end of 2024, Cali had the second highest unemployment rate in the nation at an official 5.5%, along with the highest poverty rate at nearly 20% and the highest homeless rate.  Middle-class outmigration has been joined by flagship businesses like Tesla, Oracle, and Chevron.  (Incidentally, gasoline taxes and fees cost California motorists about $1.40 per gallon.)  Imagine this economic turd show going national.

Tens of millions of dollars have been stolen by government bureaucrats and NGOs supposedly managing the homeless industrial complex as Cali’s homeless population has surged past the (estimated) 200,000 mark.  Feces, open-air drug use, and exploding crime rates due to de-carceration now define San Francisco and Los Angeles as much as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hollywood sign.

During California’s COVID lockdowns, Gavin acceded to every whim of the teachers’ unions.  Public school teachers refused to return to the classroom, preferring to indoctrinate their students via remote “learning.”  Consequently, urban schools in Cali didn’t reopen until the 2021–22 academic year.  California’s schoolteachers were ecstatic about their 18-month paid vacation, but kids suffered badly.

Additional COVID “relief” resulted in at least $20 billion stolen through identity theft, fraudulent claims, and perhaps the active participation of California’s DIE-obsessed racial bean-counters, the corrupt Employment Development Dept.

Statewide homicides in Cali increased 23% while Gavin was buffing his personal brand during his first year as governor (2019–2020), while smash-and-grab robberies skyrocketed under the Gavin-endorsed Proposition 47.

Gavin’s obligatory demonization of white males is de rigueur throughout Democrat politics.  As part of the racial pander, Gavin promised billions in “reparations” for black California residents, including de facto nationalization of private property to be redistributed along racial lines.

On so-called anthropogenic climate change, under a Newsom presidency, hundreds of billions of tax dollars and subsidies will go to NGOs, businesses, industries, and individuals hyping clean energy as a solution to unsupported claims about imminent climate collapse.  (Think of thousands of self-enriching climate bureaucrats, grant-seeking climatologists, and Solyndras feeding at the taxpayers’ trough as they fly in their private jets.)

All of this and more will go national if Gavin is elected president, and the unreformable monolithic apparatus of government will eagerly revert to its pre-Trump status quo.

Of course, by 2028, Gavin’s personal and political scandals (like his pathetic response to the Palisades Fire) will be mostly forgotten by an electorate that can barely remember what happened last week, let alone three years ago.

A complacent GOP sleepwalking into the next election cycle should heed the words of Saul Alinsky: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Erik and Todd Gregory are previous contributors to American Thinker.

Image: Gavin Newsom.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.