There’s a well-worn playbook for politicians who yearn to occupy the White House. One of its most common tools is to write a book, or have a book written, to introduce the presidential supplicant to voters.
Historians trace the practice to Thomas Jefferson, whose 1785 book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” predated his first campaign for president in 1786.
Using the book as a conscious tool of image-building is a more recent phenomenon, however, leading critic Jaime Fuller to lament the banality of such tomes in his 2019 Literary Hub article.
“These modern election books sag under wet folksiness. They are boring,” Fuller wrote.
“The current fashionable campaign book takes the form of a memoir, often ghostwritten, that unsuccessfully tries to argue that a candidate had a relatable American upbringing despite the fact said upbringing made them want to be president,” he added.
The latter comment pretty well describes the book carrying California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s name, but ghostwritten by veteran California journalist Mark Arax. It’ll be published this month.
According to accounts by journalists given pre-publication copies of “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” Newsom’s autobiography dwells on his life prior to running for governor. It’s clearly aimed at moderating, or humanizing, his long-standing image of benefiting socially, financially and politically from his ties to the wealthy Getty family.
Newsom wants us — particularly folks in other states — to believe his early life was a struggle to balance his , achieved through his father’s long career as a Getty family consigliore, with the divorce of his parents, his mother’s financial struggles and her suicide to end the misery of cancer.
“This is me taking the mask off,” Newsom said in an interview with Politico. “And it’s not just me taking a mask off and then sanitizing what’s underneath. It’s scrutinizing what’s underneath. It’s stress-testing it, and it’s trying to crack it open further and further.”
Newsom’s account of his pre-gubernatorial life also touches on less savory aspects, such as the breakup of his first marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle — who later was briefly engaged to Donald Trump Jr. — as well as Newsom’s affair with the wife of a close friend and his acknowledged problems with alcohol.
“Is it any surprise that a Democrat considering a presidential run would publish a book emphasizing that he didn’t have everything handed to him?” the New York Times asks in its article. “Of course not. Overcoming family hardship has been a quintessential origin story for the last three Democratic presidents.”
Interestingly, Newsom’s book covers neither what he has done as governor nor any manifesto about what the next president, presumably him, should do.
However, Atlantic magazine attempts to fill in one of those topics — his governorship — in its latest of several recent commentaries on Newsom’s ambitions titled “Gavin Newsom’s Record Is a Problem.”
“His new persona as a fighting moderate, a Democrat in tune with the country’s shifting desires and ruthless toward the man at the top, deftly speaks to the needs of a party desperate to regain the White House,” Marc Novicoff and Jonathan Chait write.
“But Newsom has a problem: He has been a California politician for decades, and has held the state’s governorship since 2019. During his tenure, the state has been a laboratory for some of the Democratic Party’s most politically fraught policies and instincts, which has left it less affordable and more culturally radical than it used to be. His record not only raises pressing questions about how effectively he could govern as president; it also provides opponents across social and economic issues.”
If Newsom wants to ride this rollercoaster, he’d better hold on tightly.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.
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