When Speaker Fabian Nunez held his press conference yesterday to announce that his "support" for a fair redistricting process, he didn’t count on the Mayor of San Francisco displacing all of his prime media coverage — yet that is exactly what happened. Nunez’ little tap-dance where he and his termed-out, self-interested legislative colleagues who desperately don’t want to have to return to life outside of the legislature was relegated to less optimal locations in state newspapers…
We will be talking a lot here about this ‘deal’ where a weakening of California’s term-limits statute gets married up with a fair redistricting proposal, and the pros and cons. But since I am in a hurry this morning, I will jump straight to the big news of the day…
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom had an affair with his campaign manager’s wife… Joy.
The good news for Newsom is that our nation is filled with examples of public forgiveness of marital infidelity, from President Clinton, to Mayor Giuliani, and more. The bad news for Newsom is that I think that the San Francisco Chronicle today provided more in-depth coverage of his affair than they did when the United States invaded Iraq.
I think that the bottom line is this — it was stupid, but it was not (politically) fatal. But I will say that this kind of behavior from anyone, let alone those in offices of public trust, is downright disheartening. The whole point of electing GOOD people to office is that you need to be able to count on them to do the right thing when no one is looking — especially those in an executive positions such as a Mayor. Well, if you can’t trust someone to keep his hands off of someone else’s wife, how exactly are you support to trust all of the other things for which they are responsible?
There is a natural tendency to want to separate "personal issues" from politics — but sometimes the two are inseparable. Gavin Newsom is a young man, 40 and undoubtedly his career will survive this (although when he is done reading his own town newspaper for about ten hours, he may not feel like he will). But the real loser is the institution of the office he holds, and an increased cynicism from all of us who actually expect our elected officials to be good, honorable people — especially behind closed doors.
I have to run, so that’s my ten cents for this morning.
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