Gavin Newsom

Gavin Christopher Newsom (born October 10, 1967) is an American politician and businessman who has been the 40th .html" ;"title="governor of California">governor of California since 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 49th lieutenant governor of California from 2011 to 2019 and the 42nd mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011.

Newsom attended Redwood High School and graduated from Santa Clara University. After graduation, he founded the PlumpJack wine store with billionaire heir and family friend, Gordon Getty, as an investor. The PlumpJack Group grew to manage 23 businesses, including wineries, restaurants and hotels. Newsom began his political career in 1996, when San Francisco mayor Willie Brown appointed him to the city's Parking and Traffic Commission. Brown appointed Newsom to fill a vacancy on the Board of Supervisors the next year and Newsom was elected to the board in 1998, 2000 and 2002.

In 2003, at age 36, Newsom was elected the 42nd mayor of San Francisco, the city's youngest in a century. He was reelected in 2007 with 72% of the vote.

Newsom was elected lieutenant governor of California in 2010 and reelected in 2014. He was elected governor in the 2018 election. He faced criticism for his personal behavior and leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was followed by an attempt to recall him from office. He prevailed in the 2021 recall election, "emphatically beating" what he labeled the Republican effort to remove him. Newsom was elected to a second term in the 2022 election.

Newsom hosted ''The Gavin Newsom Show'' on Current TV from 2012 to 2013 and wrote the 2013 book ''Citizenville'', about using digital tools for democratic change. Political science analysis has suggested he is moderate relative to almost all Democratic legislators in California.

Early life

Newsom was born in San Francisco, California, to Tessa Thomas (née Menzies) and William Alfred Newsom III, a state appeals court judge and attorney for Getty Oil. He is a fourth-generation San Franciscan. One of Newsom's maternal great-grandfathers, Scotsman Thomas Addis, was a pioneer scientist in the field of nephrology and a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Newsom is the second cousin, twice removed, of musician Joanna Newsom.

His father was an advocate for otters and the family had one as a pet. Newsom's parents divorced in 1972 when he was five years old.

Newsom has said he did not have an easy childhood, partly due to dyslexia. He attended kindergarten and first grade at Ecole Notre Dame Des Victoires, a French-American bilingual school in San Francisco, but eventually transferred out, due to the severe dyslexia that still affects him. It has challenged his abilities to write, spell, read, and work with numbers. Throughout his schooling, Newsom had to rely on a combination of audiobooks, digests, and informal verbal instruction. To this day, he prefers to interpret documents and reports through audio.

Newsom attended third through fifth grades at Notre Dame des Victoires, where he was placed in remedial reading classes. In high school, he played basketball and baseball and graduated from Redwood High School in 1985. Newsom was a shooting guard in basketball and an outfielder in baseball. His skills placed him on the cover of the '' Marin Independent Journal''.

Tessa Newsom worked three jobs to support Gavin and his sister Hilary Newsom Callan. In an interview with ''The San Francisco Chronicle'', his sister recalled Christmases when their mother told them they would not receive any gifts. Tessa opened their home to foster children, instilling in Newsom the importance of public service. His father's finances were strapped in part because of his tendency to give away his earnings. Newsom worked several jobs in high school to help support his family.

Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science with a major in political science. He was a left-handed pitcher for Santa Clara, but he threw his arm out after two years and has not thrown a baseball since. He lived in the Alameda Apartments, which he later compared to living in a hotel. He has reflected on his education fondly, crediting Santa Clara's Jesuit approach with helping him become an independent thinker who questions orthodoxy. While in school, Newsom spent a semester studying abroad in Rome, Italy.

Newsom's aunt was married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of then Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

Business career

Newsom and his investors created the company PlumpJack Associates L.P. on May 14, 1991. The group started the PlumpJack Winery in 1992 with the financial help of his family friend Gordon Getty. PlumpJack was the name of an opera written by Getty, who invested in 10 of Newsom's 11 businesses. Getty told the '' San Francisco Chronicle'' that he treated Newsom like a son and invested in his first business venture because of that relationship. According to Getty, later business investments were because of "the success of the first".

One of Newsom's early interactions with government occurred when Newsom resisted the San Francisco Health Department requirement to install a sink at his PlumpJack wine store. The Health Department argued that wine was a food and required the store to install a $27,000 sink in the carpeted wine shop on the grounds that the shop needed the sink for a mop. When Newsom was later appointed supervisor, he told the '' San Francisco Examiner'': "That's the kind of bureaucratic malaise I'm going to be working through."

The business grew to an enterprise with more than 700 employees. The PlumpJack Cafe Partners L.P. opened the PlumpJack Café, also on Fillmore Street, in 1993. Between 1993 and 2000, Newsom and his investors opened several other businesses that included the PlumpJack Squaw Valley Inn with a PlumpJack Café (1994), a winery in Napa Valley (1995), the Balboa Café Bar and Grill (1995), the PlumpJack Development Fund L.P. (1996), the MatrixFillmore Bar (1998), PlumpJack Wines shop Noe Valley branch (1999), PlumpJackSport retail clothing (2000), and a second Balboa Café at Squaw Valley (2000). Newsom's investments included five restaurants and two retail clothing stores. Newsom's annual income was greater than $429,000 from 1996 to 2001. In 2002, his business holdings were valued at more than $6.9 million. Newsom gave a monthly $50 gift certificate to PlumpJack employees whose business ideas failed, because in his view, "There can be no success without failure."

Newsom sold his share of his San Francisco businesses when he became mayor in 2004. He maintained his ownership in the PlumpJack companies outside San Francisco, including the PlumpJack Winery in Oakville, California, new PlumpJack-owned Cade Winery in Angwin, California, and the PlumpJack Squaw Valley Inn. He is the president in absentia of Airelle Wines Inc., which is connected to the PlumpJack Winery in Napa County. Newsom earned between $141,000 and $251,000 in 2007 from his business interests. In February 2006, he paid $2,350,000 for his residence in the Russian Hill neighborhood, which he put on the market in April 2009 for $3,000,000.

Early political career

Newsom's first political experience came when he volunteered for Willie Brown's successful campaign for mayor in 1995. Newsom hosted a private fundraiser at his PlumpJack Café. Brown appointed Newsom to a vacant seat on the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996, and he was later elected president of the commission. Brown appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors seat vacated by Kevin Shelley in 1997. At the time, he was the youngest member of San Francisco's board of supervisors.

Newsom was sworn in by his father and pledged to bring his business experience to the board. Brown called Newsom "part of the future generation of leaders of this great city". Newsom described himself as a " social liberal and a fiscal watchdog". He was elected to a full four-year term to the board in 1998. San Francisco voters chose to abandon at-large elections to the board for the previous district system in 1999. Newsom was reelected in 2000 and 2002 to represent the second district, which includes Pacific Heights, the Marina, Cow Hollow, Sea Cliff and Laurel Heights, which had San Francisco's highest income level and highest Republican registration. Newsom paid $500 to the San Francisco Republican Party to appear on the party's endorsement slate in 2000. He faced no opposition in his 2002 reelection bid.

As a San Francisco Supervisor, Newsom gained public attention for his role in advocating reform of the city's municipal railway (Muni). He was one of two supervisors endorsed by Rescue Muni, a transit riders group, in his 1998 reelection. He sponsored Proposition B to require Muni and other city departments to develop detailed customer service plans. The measure passed with 56.6% of the vote. Newsom sponsored a ballot measure from Rescue Muni; a version of the measure was approved by voters in November 1999.

Newsom also supported allowing restaurants to serve alcohol at their outdoor tables, banning tobacco advertisements visible from the streets, stiffer penalties for landlords who run afoul of rent-control laws, and a resolution, which was defeated, to commend Colin Powell for raising money for youth programs. Newsom's support for business interests at times strained his relationship with labor leaders.

During Newsom's time as supervisor, he supported housing projects through public-private partnerships to increase homeownership and affordable housing in San Francisco. He supported HOPE, a failed local ballot measure that would have allowed an increased condo-conversion rate if a certain percentage of tenants within a building were buying their units. As a candidate for mayor, he supported building 10,000 new housing units to create 15,000 new construction jobs.

Newsom's signature achievement as a supervisor was a voter initiative called Care Not Cash (Measure N), which offered care, supportive housing, drug treatment, and help from behavioral health specialists for the homeless in lieu of direct cash aid from the state's general assistance program. Many homeless rights advocates protested against the initiative. "Progressives and Democrats, nuns and priests, homeless advocates and homeless people were furious", Newsom said. The successfully passed ballot measure raised his political profile and provided the volunteers, donors, and campaign staff that helped make him a leading contender for the mayorship in 2003. In a city audit conducted four years after the inception of program and released in 2008, the program was evaluated as largely successful.

Mayor of San Francisco (2004–2011)

Elections

2003

Newsom placed first in the November 4, 2003, general election in a nine-person field. He received 41.9% of the vote to Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez's 19.6% in the first round of balloting, but he faced a closer race in the December 9 runoff, when many of the city's progressive groups supported Gonzalez. The race was partisan, with attacks against Gonzalez for his support of Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election, and attacks against Newsom for contributing $500 to a Republican slate mailer in 2000 that endorsed issues Newsom supported. Democratic leadership felt they needed to reinforce San Francisco as a Democratic stronghold after losing the 2000 presidential election and the 2003 gubernatorial recall election to Arnold Schwarzenegger. National Democratic Party figures, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jesse Jackson, campaigned for Newsom. Five supervisors endorsed Gonzalez, while Willie Brown endorsed Newsom.

Newsom won the runoff with 53% of the vote to Gonzalez's 47%, a margin of 11,000 votes. He ran as a business-friendly centrist Democrat and a moderate in San Francisco politics; some of his opponents called him conservative. Newsom claimed he was a centrist in the Dianne Feinstein mold. He ran on the slogan "great cities, great ideas", and presented over 21 policy papers. He pledged to continue working on San Francisco's homelessness issue.

Newsom was sworn in as mayor on January 3, 2004. He called for unity among the city's political factions, and promised to address the issues of public schools, potholes and affordable housing. Newsom said he was "a different kind of leader" who "isn't afraid to solve even the toughest problems".

2007

San Francisco's progressive community tried to field a candidate to run a strong campaign against Newsom. Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly considered running, but both declined. Gonzalez also decided not to challenge Newsom again.

When the August 10, 2007, filing deadline passed, San Francisco's discussion shifted to talk about Newsom's second term. He was challenged in the election by 13 candidates, including George Davis, a nudist activist, and Michael Powers, owner of the Power Exchange sex club. Conservative former supervisor Tony Hall withdrew by early September due to lack of support.

The '' San Francisco Chronicle'' declared in August 2007 that Newsom faced no "serious threat to his re-election bid", having raised $1.6 million for his reelection campaign by early August. He was reelected on November 6 with over 72% of the vote. Upon taking office for a second term, Newsom promised to focus on the environment, homelessness, health care, education, housing, and rebuilding San Francisco General Hospital.

Mayoralty

As mayor, Newsom focused on development projects in Hunters Point and Treasure Island.

He gained national attention in 2004 when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, violating the state law passed in 2000. Implementation of Care Not Cash, the initiative he had sponsored as a supervisor, began on July 1, 2004. As part of the initiative, 5,000 more homeless people were given permanent shelter in the city. About 2,000 people had been placed into permanent housing with support by 2007. Other programs Newsom initiated to end chronic homelessness included the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SF HOT) and Project Homeless Connect (PHC), which placed 2,000 homeless people into permanent housing and provided 5,000 additional affordable rental units in the city.

During a strike by hotel workers against a dozen San Francisco hotels, Newsom joined UNITE HERE union members on a picket line in front of the Westin St. Francis Hotel on October 27, 2004. He vowed that the city would boycott the hotels by not sponsoring city events at them until they agreed to a contract with workers. The contract dispute was settled in September 2006.

In 2005, Newsom pushed for a state law to allow California communities to create policy restricting certain breeds of dogs. In 2007, he signed the law establishing Healthy San Francisco

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