How Gavin Newsom became a politician

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM’S new book, Young Man in a Hurry, is a surprisingly engaging and introspective book, especially coming from a politician. Much of it takes place along Fillmore Street, where Newsom opened his first businesses and became the neighborhood’s representative on the Board of Supervisors — before moving up to mayor and then governor.

In two scenes, the book tells the story of his early political rise in the neighborhood.

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In 1996, I got a call from an aide to Mayor Willie Brown, who was one of our regulars at PlumpJack Cafe. I had co-hosted a fundraiser at the wine store as a favor to Willie and also walked precincts for him.

“The mayor wants to appoint you to the city’s Film Commission. What do you say?”

The idea of public service intrigued me, and it took me only a moment to say yes.

A few weeks later, I made my way to city hall for the swearing-in ceremony with 30 or 40 other appointees. As Mayor Brown went down the list, I could feel my heart pounding the closer he got to me, the newest member of the Film Commission. “And Gavin Newsom. Welcome to your seat as the next chair of the Parking and Traffic Commission,” Willie said. Parking and Traffic? The chair? What role did the chair play? Was this Willie’s idea of a joke? In a blink, he swore me in….

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Before I finished my first year as chair of the commission, Mayor Brown approached me with an even more unusual offer. Would I be interested in filling a vacancy on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? I was a political greenhorn with scarcely the essentials to warrant such consideration, and the question occurred to me: Why was Willie choosing me except that he knew my father and was privy to my more or less competent performance on the Parking and Traffic Commission? I might have been inclined to say yes right then, but this was a step in a far more serious direction, one whose potential perils my father knew much about. We were having a meal at the Balboa when I told Dad of Willie’s offer. I’m sure he provided me wise counsel, delved into the complications of juggling a political life with a multipronged business, but that’s not what I recall. What sticks with me is how he literally glowed with pride. He did not need to tell me that we are from an extended clan that numbered 46 attorneys and one genuine power broker but never a politician, which he considered a high enough calling that he had run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors himself in 1967, the year of my birth, only to lose.

The next day I called Willie and told him I was in. When the occasion came again for the mayor to explain my selection to the public in January 1997, Willie did so by telling another joke: “Let me introduce Gavin Newsom, my affirmative action pick.” The line got a laugh, but it was, in fact, true. The 11-member board included a gay white male, a Latina lesbian, a Jewish lesbian, a Latino male, a Black reverend and two Chinese Americans, one of each gender. Not only was I the youngest member of the board, but I was the only straight white male. “Odd Man In,” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Newsom’s book is available at Browser Books on Fillmore and other bookstores around the city.