Gavin Newsom is spending $19 million of California taxpayer money to make himself look good before a presidential campaign.
The state is running a $3 billion deficit. One in five Californians lives in poverty. Businesses are leaving in droves.
And the governor’s response is a marketing campaign to polish California’s image after his sixteen years in statewide office.
In other words, publicly funded reputation management for a man eyeing the White House.
California doesn’t have an image problem, but it does have a governance problem. No amount of paid advertising will paper over that — though Newsom is clearly willing to spend other people’s money to try.
This is California governance in miniature. When reality becomes uncomfortable, hire a publicist.
The request for proposals reads less like a public policy document and more like a crisis memo drafted by a Hollywood studio after a catastrophic box-office flop.
California, we are told, has been “maligned.” Critics are spreading “misinformation.” The state simply needs a better story, better messaging, better optics.
What it manifestly does not need, apparently, is better policy.
But California’s reputation isn’t being drafted in red-state capitals or conservative newsrooms. It’s being written by the people leaving.
More people departed California last year than from any other state in the union. Not because a conservative podcast told them to, but because their rent statements, insurance bills, and property tax notices made a fairly persuasive argument.
It is worth noting that California has led the nation in outbound migration every single year since Newsom became governor in 2019. Connecting those particular dots requires no advanced training.
Rent that consumes half a paycheck. Schools that bury whatever hope is left. Businesses that once anchored the economy, slipping across state lines.
Homeless encampments that stretch for blocks in cities that once sold themselves as the future. Insurance companies that drop the housing market wholesale, spooked by wildfire liabilities the state has spent years refusing to manage.
The middle class, that stubborn engine of civic life, is vanishing faster than Newsom’s concern for it.
None of that requires “misinformation” to explain. It requires an honest conversation about the policies of a governor who presided over every single one of those failures and is now billing taxpayers to pretend otherwise.
The primary beneficiary of a rehabilitated California image is the politician who broke it.
California’s dysfunction is far more than an inconvenient backdrop for Newsom’s broader ambitions. It is the biography he is running against.
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A presidential campaign built on California’s record requires California’s record to look considerably less like a crime scene. Fix the optics, the logic goes, and the liability shrinks.
The parallel writes itself, though Newsom would prefer it didn’t.
In 2019, Democrats impeached Donald Trump for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family — conduct they characterized, clearly and repeatedly, as the deployment of public power for private political gain.
The argument, when stripped of its ceremonial outrage, was that you cannot use the machinery of government to serve your own electoral interests.
Newsom supported that impeachment. He made the case alongside his party that such conduct wasn’tmerely inappropriate but disqualifying.
It is a principle worth revisiting.
Newsom is spending $19 million in state funds — that the state cannot spare — to correct a “narrative” that happens to be the single biggest obstacle between him and a presidential podium.
The logic is identical: public resources, private political benefit.
When Trump did it, Newsom called it impeachable. When Newsom does it, he calls it communications strategy.
It’s funny how the finest principles tend to expire precisely when they become inconvenient to their owners.
The least California’s taxpayers deserve is the one thing Newsom has never offered them, and that is the truth.
John Mac Ghlionn is an essayist and commentator who covers politics and culture.
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