To the delight of California’s illegal aliens, socialists, unqualified minority job-seekers and militant bicyclers who blow up Hummer dealerships in the name of suffering polar bears, smarmy San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday he is running for governor in 2010. Newsom chose San Francisco-based Twitter─the de facto, mandatory communication tool for hip celebs and gossipy high school girls─to officially reveal his plans. Indeed, inexperienced, over-packaged, provincial narcissists with radical agendas, cocaine issues, elitism fetishes, an undeserved sense of entitlement and contempt for the American way of life aren’t just for the White House anymore. California has found change it can believe in.
At a time when reckless, lightweight, non-achieving ideologues are all the rage in American politics; when nary a meaningful accomplishment is needed to move up the political ladder; when substance takes a backseat to teleprompters and pedestrian, car salesman charms; Newsom is trying to parlay his overly-bleached smile, expensive suits and camera-ready prop wife (not pictured below) into the most visible governorship in the United States.
The early conventional wisdom on Newsom─when first elected─was that despite the vapid pretty boy image, insiders knew he was he was going to be the next JFK, if not better. Five years later the reviews are in: even the insiders realize that on his best day, he’s an embarrassment to vapid pretty boys everywhere.
To date, Newsom’s greatest achievement as Mayor of San Francisco was getting re-elected in a landslide despite having repeated sex with his best friend’s/campaign manager’s wife (of course, he had to go through the motions of rehab following a Pat O’Brien style booza culpa). Other notable accomplishments include arriving drunk to the vigil of a dying police officer; declaring a city-wide “Colt Studio Day” to honor a San Francisco-based gay porn company (there’s no such thing as too much pandering to the gay community in San Francisco politics); fellaciating a news reporter’s microphone on camera (admittedly, he may have been drunk or high on coke at the time); unilaterally ordering city agencies to issue marriage licenses to gay couples without any legal authorization to do so (he was ignoring the US Constitution before Obama made it cool to do so); offering no-questions-asked city ID cards and bank accounts to illegal aliens to help them launder save their money; appearing in the contact list of Paris Hilton’s hacked cell phone; increasing city funding of alternative lifestyle street festivals; dating a 19-year-old girl in between wives (though he honorably forced her to change her age on MySpace to 26 in anticipation of cameras catching them drinking together); and violating federal law in the name of sanctuary by failing to report illegal aliens negotiating their way through the city’s criminal justice system.
Newsom’s reign over San Francisco reflects the tradition of City Hall legends Kwame Kilpatrick, Marion “Bitch Set Me Up” Barry, John Street and Ray Nagin─combining bad judgment, bad policies, incompetence, arrogance and corruption in creative, new ways. The city is in disarray: bankrupt; filthy; ubiquitously potholed and cracked; and festering with drugs, homeless and illegals. Its sanctuary-city status, touchy-feely approach to crime, and maniacal spending on social services have encouraged all matter of societal debris to migrate there in mass. When it doesn’t smell like over-ripe trash, it smells like stale urine. Not really what Tony Bennett had in mind.
Law and order is (sort of) maintained by an inept police department emasculated by Newsom’s fondness for illegal aliens and affirmative action. His bizarre choice of police commissioner, Asian-American female Heather Fong (think of her as San Francisco’s version of Janet Napolitano but wimpier, less qualified and more stupid), helped him with the city’s considerable Asian and “progressive” votes, but didn’t help much with the crime rate in general or the homicide rate in particular, which reached a 13-year high under her watch. Fong is best known for forgetting to take a required gun re-certification test and inspiring department-wide contempt and disorganization.
The SFPD recently found its way into national headlines when it was learned that a hapless undocumented worker with multiple felony convictions and at least four timeouts in San Francisco prisons had no trouble getting out and killing a man along with his two sons. Per Newsom’s policy of progressive tolerance ─ multiple felony convictions notwithstanding ─ this unfortunate fellow was never reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.
However, luckily for the SFPD, thanks to the existence of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Organization, the SFPD is not the city’s least organized and most dysfunctional agency. Seemingly, the only thing killing more people in San Francisco than illegal aliens and common criminals is Muni busses. But in all fairness, Newsom did ban all bottled water from city government offices to help the environment.
In a peculiar juxtaposition, while Newsom wants to capitalize on the Obama Inertia and ride his hallowed Burberry coattails into the California Governor’s Mansion, the broke, wretched San Francisco he leaves behind may well be a microcosm of the America Obama leaves behind once all of his hope/change jibber jabber has been realized. Both men stand for the same idiocy; they’re just operating at different points on their respective disaster timelines.
If there’s an upside to Gavin Newsom it’s the latest Mrs. Newsom. This is not your father’s first lady. Yes, she’s pretty; she knows how to smile; and she knows how to dress (putting her at least three legs up on another first lady I know). She even comes complete with a Stanford pedigree. But more importantly, she’s starring in a movie released last month where she engages in a three-way sex act with a Sasquatch and an alien (space, not illegal). If there’s someone out there who’s put a Stanford MBA to better use, I’m not aware of it. Take that, Shriver!
One of Newsom’s Democratic competitors in 2010 will probably be another unaccomplished, philandering, dead-behind-the-eyes big-city mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa of Tijuana by the Sea Los Angeles. Villaraigosa’s credentials include past membership in a Mexican street gang and changing his name mid-way through life to something more exotic (a la Barry Sotero)–the lovably ethnic Villaraigosa used to be Tony Villar, Jr. Other likely Democratic candidates include former Governor Moonbeam himself, Jerry Brown, and one-third of Capitol Hill’s NorCal half-wit trifecta, Diane Feinstein. Clearly, not the best options… kind of like the sides menu at a county fair fish-on-a-stick stand.
At the rate Barry is debasing the Office of President of the United States, the empty suit movement should be debunked by 2010. But as the 2008 presidential election demonstrated, the naiveté of the electorate can never be under-estimated. If a dopey community organizer can be elected President of the United States, why couldn’t an aging, wannabe frat boy be elected Governor of California?