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TALKING POLITICS
Newsom in ’08?
BY ADAM REILLY

Practically speaking, the notion of a Gavin Newsom presidential run is laughably premature. But anyone who watched the San Francisco mayor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government this Tuesday could be excused for jumping the gun. Newsom — whose decision to allow gay marriages in San Francisco last year has been panned as an electoral liability by none other than openly gay Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank — was in Cambridge to discuss the gay-marriage issue and its political implications. And he did so compellingly — offering, in the process, a glimpse of the kind of rhetoric John Kerry should have used to defend full marriage rights to fellow Democrats and the national electorate. (Case in point: "My family said, ‘You’ve destroyed your career — how can you do this? Have you not learned anything in church?’ I said, ‘I’ve learned a lot in church. I’ve learned the values and principles I was taught, and I need to enunciate them; I needed to manifest them. To me, this was an ideal whose time had come."

However strong the substance of his remarks, however, it was Newsom’s form that made his performance great. At first, he seemed a bit slick — a tad too handsome and articulate and charismatic. But once he’d warmed up the crowd and hit his oratorical stride, it was something to behold. One minute, Newsom was gloating over Colorado’s transformation from Red State to Blue State; the next, he was invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" — and then, somehow, joking about Gray Davis hitting him up for a job. Through it all, Newsom shifted moods effortlessly: now chin-jutting defiance, now faux-innocence played coyly for laughs, now simple, earnest idealism. The inconsistencies of his argument escaped notice. His stock laugh lines sounded fresh and unrehearsed. And the calls for a new politics of honesty and idealism? Seemingly half the students who filed to the microphones during the Q&A began by asking, only half in jest, if they could work for Newsom this summer.

Near the end of his talk — just before he closed by urging the crowd not to settle for civil unions — Newsom spun an anecdote about returning from Davos with Al Gore. (Just another municipal day at the office, that.) The two men got to the airport, and what did Gore do? He asked Newsom where he could find the rental car. The almost-president of the United States asked for help finding his rental car. The lesson, Newsom claimed, is this: political fame is fleeting, so you’d better make good use of it while you can. "We are a dime a dozen," he told the audience. "We come and go." It was a nice sentiment, but in this particular case, it didn't ring true. Count on this: Newsom’s time in the political spotlight has just begun.


Issue Date: February 11 - 17, 2005
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