San Francisco might be cleaning up for company, but there’s no doubt Gavin Newsom has a bigger party in mind.
With an international summit swinging into town this week, the City by the Bay has been making headlines lately for finally getting around to moving out the drug addicts and aggressive panhandlers who have turned one of the most beautiful cities in the country into a byword for ruin.
But as cynical as it might have looked to get the showcase city cleaned up just for foreigners, the Golden State’s progressive governor has his eye on a national audience, too.
That was the take from Dave Rubin, the progressive-turned-conservative-commentator and author who appeared on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Monday, who said the San Francisco cleanup had a goal far beyond just looking good at this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
“I would say, and I don’t mean this in a cynical fashion, I mean I’m fairly certain Gavin Newsom is getting ready to run for president one way or another when they decide to push Joe Biden out,” he said.
“So it would behoove him to have a clean San Francisco and clean California as a whole, so maybe he will stick with this thing.”
Well, Rubin might not have meant it in a “cynical fashion,” but “cynical” is about the best word there is for it.
As Rubin pointed out, Newsom — the preening peacock of a progressive — is a former mayor of San Francisco who “largely destroyed that city.”
“And now he’s become governor of California and largely destroyed that state,” Rubin said.
Check out the interview here:
Of course, there’s been no shortage of stories in recent years about the decline of San Francisco into an urban eyesore.
Crime is rampant (comically so, for Dave Chapelle fans, anyway).
Drug addiction and its twin tragedies of death and despair are at epidemic levels.
Businesses, not surprisingly, are leaving the city in droves, from mom-and-pops to marquee companies like Nordstrom and Whole Foods closing locations.
It’s the logical progression of progressive politics in other words — from the abdication of personal responsibility at the individual level to the arrogant incompetence of intrusive government, with the current lefitst mania for attacking law enforcement thrown in.
Those are problems that aren’t unique to San Francisco in California.
Oakland, across the bay, is cursed with a progressive prosecutor whose tenure has been met by a predictable increase in crime in a city that wasn’t all that safe in the first place.
Down south, Los Angeles has become almost as well known for its homeless encampments as it is for the glitterati stars of Beverly Hills.
And in Sacramento, Gavin Newsom presides over the basket case of a state and actually has the gall to dream of taking that horror show to Washington, only a year after surviving a recall election. (Newsom won handily, but the fact that the effort made it to the ballot shows the depth of voter discontent with his performance.)
Newsom wants to put the policies that have led California down the tubes onto the national agenda.
If that’s going to happen, of course, presenting the country and the world with a picture of San Francisco in its currently natural state — a place of public defecation, smash-and-grabs and a dangerous illegal drug trade — wouldn’t suit Newsom’s ambitions.
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It might let the rest of America — the kind of NPR-loving liberals who live in nice safe suburbia — get an inkling of what happens when Democrats get full control.
So, with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit rolling into town, San Francisco has rolled up its streets, clearing out homeless tents and drug markets, as the New York Post reported Friday.
That wasn’t done for the benefit of San Franciscans, of course. The Democratic-dominated government has long since made clear it doesn’t give a damn about ordinary citizens.
It also wasn’t done simply for the benefit of the jet-setting summiteers and the millions of dollars they’re going to be pumping into the San Francisco economy.
It was done for the benefit of a national American audience — normal people who might be catching a glimpse of the APEC summit on the news or reading about it online and seeing images of San Francisco as it looks at its best, when almost any view of the city at any point is almost heart-breakingly beautiful.
And, ultimately, it was done for the benefit of Gavin Newsom, a man whose magazine-ad good looks, sculpted hair, and ruling-class hypocrisy make a virtual caricature of West Coast, left-wing politics.
Newsom has said all the right things for an ambitious Democrat with a doddering Democrat in the Oval Office — pledging his support for President Joe Biden while Biden runs for re-election. But his public actions speak louder, and making sure San Francisco is prettied up for its time in the spotlight might even have been the biggest hint yet that Newsom is aiming for the White House.
The Joe Biden presidency is already a disaster. If Rubin is right, what’s waiting in the wings is worse.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
