Janice Hahn and Gavin Newsom already have scored a surprise political victory. They’ve convinced California newspapers to actually write about the lieutenant governor’s race.
Here’s hoping they enjoy it because the moment won’t last for long.
What you have here is Newsom, the San Francisco mayor, doing his very public Hamlet imitation: To run or not to run, that is the question.
In the other corner you have Hahn, the Los Angeles councilwoman, treating Newsom as if he’s the political equivalent of King Kong and her top job is to shoot him off the Empire State Building.
The fun started earlier this month when a San Francisco pollster released a survey that showed Newsom running well ahead of Hahn and Central Valley state Sen. Dean Florez in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.
But Newsom wasn’t in the LG race. It wasn’t that many months ago that he was dropping out of the governor’s race so that he could spend more time on his day job as mayor.
So Newsom called a press conference last week to say that while he wasn’t really running for lieutenant governor, he was looking at the race and even though he was filing an official statement with the secretary of state saying that “I’m running for Lieutenant Governor because it’s time for us to finally shake up Sacramento and reform state government,” people shouldn’t read too much into that.
Yeah, right. Hahn, faced with the prospect of her 24 percent to 8 percent lead over Florez in a early February becoming a 33 percent to 17 percent runner-up effort with Newsom in the race, understandably went ballistic.
She quickly released a YouTube video highlighting Newsom’s comment that he doesn’t really know what the lieutenant governor does, adding the suggestion that her supporters should “pass it on to five friends.”
The campaign quickly followed that with a press release called “A Travelogue Through Gavin Newsom’s Mind on the Subject of Running for Lieutenant Governor,” featuring some of Newsom’s, ah, less enthusiastic comments about the LG job.
Not included in that Greatest Hits list are the times Garry South, Newsom’s top political adviser in the governor’s race, dismissed any idea his guy would stoop so low as to run for an office as useless as lieutenant governor. That’s the same Garry South who’s now Hahn’s chief strategist in her run for, you got it, lieutenant governor.
Then there’s the fund-raising letter in which Michael Trujillo, Hahn’s campaign manager, played the woman card by suggesting that Newsom “did what boys usually do, he tried to push the woman out of the race, out of the way, out of the light.”
Fun stuff. But Newsom is far from the only person in California who doesn’t have much idea what the lieutenant governor does or who suggests that the job is “a largely ceremonial position” or believes that it’s a job “with no real authority and no real portfolio.”
Back in another lifetime, in those halcyon days of 2006, I sat with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle and listened to John Garamendi talk loftily about how he was going to transform the lieutenant governor’s office and use its many hidden powers to push issues important to the state.
He won. But less than 16 months later, Garamendi was making a long shot run for governor, having decided that he would rather lose and go back to his ranch than spend four more years in a non-job like the LG post. Instead, he got lucky and ended up in Congress.
Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger echoed that sentiment last year, when he slashed the lieutenant governor’s budget by 62 percent. “The lieutenant governor’s duties just really are a lower priority,” than just about anything else in the budget, said Mike Genest, then the state finance director.
The lieutenant governor’s main job is to be there in case the governor dies and, in the interim, fill a seat on a lot of commissions that either don’t have much power (the Commission for Economic Development) or have a whole bunch of members (the UC Board of Regents/CSU Board of Trustees), of which he or she is but a single vote.
Hahn insists that her work on those many commissions will help change the state, a la Garamendi. Newsom says the job could serve as a bully pulpit, which would only be true if anyone in California paid any attention to what a lieutenant governor had to say, which would be a first.
Not to say any of that is a reason for Hahn or Newsom not to run for the office – that’s what politicians do.
But if form holds, whoever wins the lieutenant governor’s race will get an important-sounding statewide job and then disappear for four years, reappearing in 2014 to look at another rung on the political ladder.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.