FIRE UPDATE: Gavin Newsom will never be president of the United States.

This is the second major crisis that he has botched in 5 years.

Gavin Newsom will never be president of the United States.

This is the second major crisis that he has botched in 5 years.

Hillary Clinton used to run attack ads against Obama that asked the question “Who do you want taking the 3 AM phone call?,” in the 2008 campaign.

These were highly effective ads against an inexperienced junior senator in what turned out to be the closest Democrat presidential primary in history.

When the same question is asked about California Governor Gavin Newsom, the answer will be devastating.

All scorched roads lead back to his office with the latest round of devastating forest fires.

The issues that his office was aware of (or should have been aware of) that allowed this disaster to take place are almost too many to count.

For years, the state had failed to clear the tinderbox of underbrush in California’s forests. Reservoirs were emptied to satisfy the fishing demands of California’s Indian tribes.

Millions of gallons of river water were not stored to protect minnows.

Fire hydrants were not refilled and local fire departments were allowed to prioritize hiring lesbians over competent firemen.

The horrific optics of this disaster have only been compounded by the fact that Newson has not had a single good political moment since its onset. Unlike George W. Bush’s bravura “we can hear you and those who did this will hear all of us soon” performance on the ruble of Ground Zero, Newsom’s few public appearances have been negative: mostly concerning angry citizens confronting him.

It is worth noting that natural disasters do not always have to be PR disasters for a governor.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s leadership during the several hurricanes of 2024 was so competent that the destruction that the sunshine state suffered has been entirely forgotten on the national scene. The DeSantis administration took appropriate proactive measures to mitigate the potential disaster and then immediately executed a cleanup plan.

This is a stark contrast from the California wildfire situation, where the problem has only been allowed to grow for weeks with no end in sight.

The wildfire problem compounds with Newsom‘s handling of COVID.

The public health policies the Governor embraced at the time have now been widely accepted as ineffective. Numerous studies show that lockdowns and masking were ineffective at stopping the spread of COVID-19 and brought about a variety of unintended consequences such as learning and IQ losses in children.

This is further compounded by the images of the Governor signing an executive order to continue his lockdown orders, then joining the wealthiest Californians for a posh dinner at the French Laundry.

A talented presidential PR team could triage the inevitable usage of these images in attack ads by saying; “this was an unprecedented time, mistakes were made on all sides.”

That is a tactic that was successfully embraced by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer when she ran for reelection as governor of Michigan in 2022.

However, there is nothing unprecedented about wildfires. Wildfires occur in any state with forest or grassland. California has wildfires every year, so presumably the governor should be competent at containing them.

No PR team or clever spin machine will be able to overcome this simple fact.

It is also unclear what sort of PR team he would be able to cobble together during a future campaign. Television ad ads are expensive, especially so in Los Angeles.

These fires have hit the wealthiest areas of California. We may not be able to expect residents of Malibu and Hollywood to become hard-core Alabama Republicans overnight, but these disenchanted Democrats may simply choose to withhold their donations the next time he seeks office.

This alone could be enough to sink him in a presidential race but there will be other issues ahead.

These fires will certainly prompt investigations at the state or federal level that will go on for years; it is unlikely the findings will be to his advantage.

Labor prices will surge as demand skyrockets to rebuild houses, insurers will cancel more policies, and a certain amount of Californians will likely flee the state. This will fill the media with more damaging stories in the next few years.

Then, if Newsom somehow survives all this, he must face his biggest challenge; the Democrat primaries.

The first three primary states are Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

It is hard to see any of these crucial primary states giving a majority of their delegates to a governor that will be, in their minds, so closely related to disaster.

Even if the Newsom PR team can maintain his support with Californians in his home state primary, California is very late in the presidential primary process; the race is almost always determined by the time the land of fruit and nuts casts its ballots.

There is no doubt that Newsom has presidential ambitions.

As Cowtown Caller previously reported, Newsom appeared to flirt with the idea of running for president in the interim between Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and Kamala Harris clenching the nomination.

When the attack ads inevitably ask middle America “Who do you want taking the 3 AM phone call?” it is not clear at this time who they will say they want— but it is clear they will say they don’t want Gavin Newsom.

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