If something seems a little “off” with regard to California politics these days, don’t blame last weekend’s time change.
What’s different in 2023 from recent years (and decades) past: California’s chief executive won’t be delivering a televised State of the State address, as is the norm at some point in the early weeks of a new year.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s rationale: a very Sinatra-like “my way”—i.e., he had plenty to say in January’s inaugural address, and there’s nothing etched in the state’s constitution saying that he has to do a second star turn in front of the cameras, in contrast to Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the US Constitution, which says that the president of the United States “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Instead, Newsom this week is scheduled to hit the road to sell his second-term concerns to Californians in a select few media events around the state (that announcement preceding the news that Newsom had tested positive for COVID—for a second time—upon returning from a “personal” trip to Baja, Mexico).
The humanitarian in me wants to give Newsom a pass for not giving the traditional “big speech.” After all, this is a governor who suffers from dyslexia, which makes reading from a teleprompter more of an ordeal than most of us can appreciate.
And the recovering speechwriter in me believes that the Golden State somehow will survive with one less Newsom “word salad.”
In a past life, I wrote State of the State addresses for a former governor (always delivered in early January so as to set the tone for the legislative year and to get the jump on other governors positing similar agendas). Trust me—and this pertains to all California governors, regardless of their partisan stripes: what starts out as a spirited jaunt down a California freeway instead turns into an ugly pile-up, a piecemeal speech weighed down by too many policy bromides and cheap applause lines.
Add to that one other California consideration: as the speech typically is delivered live from the State Capitol during the late morning of a weekday—though Newsom two years ago delivered a funereal State of the State address in an empty Dodger Stadium to underscore COVID-related suffering and sacrifice—local television stations in the Golden State’s biggest media markets stick with their usual a.m. fare rather than air the speech live.
So perhaps we should thank Newsom for bucking tradition. And maybe award him some extra credit for resisting the urge to deliver a State of the State after Florida governor Ron DeSantis gave his Tallahassee version last week (DeSantis, ironically, having returned from a brief trip to the Golden State during which he took aim at California’s “woke ideology”).
On the other hand, California’s governor is missing a chance to address some thorny matters that merit his and the state legislature’s immediate attention.
One such example: last week’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—the largest failure of a US bank in over 15 years and perhaps something of personal (if not financial) interest to Newsom, the co-founder of a wine company, as the bank has been the main financial institution for Golden State wineries for almost three decades.
Unbeknownst to most Californians, there is a state-government entity, California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI), whose mission is to protect consumers and regulate financial services. As Silicon Valley Bank is a state-chartered bank, it was DFPI’s task to both take possession of SVB and appoint the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as the crippled bank’s receiver.
Now would seem a good time for Newsom, as the head of California’s government, to pass along what his agency has to say about the health of the Golden State’s banking industry.
Moreover, there’s the CalAccount Blue Ribbon Commission, whose purpose is to come up with new ways to:
protect consumers who lack access to traditional banking services from predatory, discriminatory, and costly alternatives, and to offer state residents access to a voluntary, zero-fee, zero-penalty, federally insured transaction account, and related payment services, including robust and geographically diverse mechanisms for accessing account funds and account management tools that facilitate the automation of basic financial transactions designed to serve the needs of individuals with low or fluctuating income.
That commission was tasked with delivering a market analysis by July 2024. Perhaps Newsom would like to turn its attention to the SVB meltdown?
A second matter worthy of the governor’s televised attention: California’s stormy weather and its impact on his constituents.
As mentioned earlier, Newsom was in Mexico at the time many Californians were dealing with the residual effects of floodwaters or digging out from record snowfalls. The Mexico jaunt may not be a political injury on the level of Newsom’s infamous French Laundry outing that riled COVID-restricted Californians (“Do as I say, not as I dine”), but it wouldn’t hurt the governor to show a little empathy toward those whose lives have been disrupted by the inclement weather (perhaps this occurs at some point during Newsom’s policy tour).
Time will tell if Newsom reverts to business as usual next year and delivers a televised State of the State address.
Or, for that matter, if Newsom delivers a commencement address at UC-Berkeley while still in office.
A list of Berkeley commencement speakers dating back to the 1864 shows what one might expect—the university as a platform for America’s political elite. Then president Theodore Roosevelt did the honors in 1903, as did Harry Truman in 1948. (William McKinley, Roosevelt’s predecessor, was supposed to deliver 1901’s commencement address but cancelled due to his wife’s sudden illness.)
But it’s a different story with regard to incumbent California governors.
Jerry Brown (BA ’61 Classics) twice delivered commencement addresses at his alma mater—in 1993 and Winter 2004. But those were between his two eight-year stints as California’s governor (1975–83 and 2011–19).
The answer to the trivia question of the only sitting California governor to deliver a UC-Berkeley commencement: Henry Huntly Haight, the Golden State’s 10th governor, in 1871.
Should Newsom follow in Haight’s footsteps, his commencement address should begin with an apology—not for his own actions, but for what his predecessor said back during the Reconstruction era.
Then governor Haight, who signed the 1868 Organic Act creating the flagship of the University of California system, would be about as welcome on today’s Berkeley campus as Donald Trump at a Joan Baez concert. Consider this passage from his 1867 inaugural address:
If the negro requires the ballot to protect himself, as others assert, then the Asiatic needs it to protect himself. There is, however, no truth in either statement. No principle of justice is involved any more than in the case of females or minors, or foreigners not naturalized. Nor does the negro need the ballot to protect himself any more than either of the other classes referred to; on the contrary, it is for the good of both of those races that the elective franchise should be confined to the whites. The aid of Africans and Asiatics would be an evil, and not a benefit.
Haight would go on to oppose the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. When Congress adapted the latter, which granted voting rights to all males over the age of 21, Haight called upon the state legislature to oppose its ratification. In his words, “If this amendment is adopted, the most degraded Digger Indian within our borders becomes at once an elector, and so far, a ruler. His vote would count for as much as that of the most intelligent white man in the State.”
Fast-forward to 2023 and a UC-Berkeley enrollment in which Asian and “Chicanx/Latinx” students combined outnumber White undergraduate and graduate students by a two-to-one margin. Haight, we can assume, would hate such progress.
And Governor Newsom? Hopefully, whatever he might have to say given a chance to address a Berkeley graduation crowd would better endure the march of time.
