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GAVIN NEWSOM...READY for CA?
So, who do you like for California Governor next year? Is California actually "governable?" What do you look for in a candidate running for Governor? Tell me your thoughts, RREconomy@aol.com .
Thanks for a great job from the New York Times Magazine reporter Jeff Minton for this great inside look at California politics!
NY Times Magazine PreviewWho Can Possibly Govern California?
Jeff Minton for The New York TimesMayor
Gavin Newsom of
San Francisco, one of a crowd of colorful candidates vying to be California’s next governor.
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: July 1, 2009
Gavin Newsom, the
mayor of San Francisco, has an emergency button under his desk that was installed 30 years ago after former City Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a window and fatally shot Mayor
George Moscone and Supervisor
Harvey Milk. Not knowing what the button was for, Newsom kept pushing it on his first day in office, only to have three sheriffs rush in repeatedly.
I was sitting in Newsom’s office in May, and the mayor was fidgeting behind his desk, which is neat except for a few side-by-side stacks of collated papers. These are what Newsom calls his CliffsNotes, part of an elaborate system of self-education he developed over several years.
Newsom struggled with severe dyslexia as a child and compensated by rereading, underlining, bracketing and scrawling comments in the margins. “I just butcher a book,” he explained to me. “Everything I underline I assume is important to me.” Interns type up what Newsom has underlined and produce a set of notes for him. “Sometimes I will make CliffsNotes of my CliffsNotes,” Newsom said. He described the practice as “really pathetic.” But it works for him and illustrates a larger point about people with learning disabilities: when a person struggles to learn in conventional ways, he said, you adapt “in ways that can nurture creative solutions.” Doing so can also promote “audacious goals that many would dismiss as irrational.”
That may well be the best description of Newsom’s latest ambition: to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California even as the state is in the midst of one of its recurring cataclysms. They come along once or twice a decade, sparked by natural disaster or some fiasco of overcrowding (prisons, schools, roads) or shortage (water, energy, cash) or civic rebellion (taxes, cops, Gray Davis). California always seems to produce more spectacle than anywhere else in the country, and that goes for its meltdowns too. Calamity is just part of the equation here, as if God gave California so much glamour and grandeur and great weather that he had to throw in some apocalyptic menace to provide a little balance. Earthquakes, say. Or Sacramento.
Californians, would-be governors included, have learned to take crises in stride. “People have been declaring this place on the brink of extinction for decades,” said Newsom, who was born in San Francisco and reared in the city and in the adjacent county of Marin. When I visited him in his office, Newsom, who is 41, had just finished rereading his notes on one of his favorite books about the state, “Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003,” by Kevin Starr. Newsom’s CliffsNotes for “Coast of Dreams” fill 77 pages. He gave me a set, after leafing through them to make sure he had not written anything embarrassing in the margins.
“California had become . . . a reality in search of a myth that had once been believed in,” Starr writes in a passage highlighted by Newsom. “That dream, in fact, had been the first and only premise of the Schwarzenegger campaign.” Those days, in the early years of this decade, were the last time real life overwhelmed the state’s ability to govern itself — that’s when voters recalled their governor, Gray Davis, and once again looked beyond “reality,” to Hollywood, for their next savior, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Click HERE for the REST of the STORY....
Randy Economy Photos. Copyright. 2009![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=920037ce-e92f-46ee-8e19-49a9e9d8772d)
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Remember, be smart this weekend, and don't get all crazy shooting off fireworks were they are banned.
I was with my bro Martin Garnier (from the country of Burma....this was his first time selling fireworks)and Father Tony Gomez, community/church leaders Tom Yokohama, and Percy Garces, and George Gonzalez and many others. 
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