POLITICS: The clock’s running out for globetrotting Newsom

Gavin Newsom has been criticized for his recent rhetoric at the Munich Security Conference. But it’s his neglect at home that is the real problem.

Newsom has indulged in two European visits in 2026 alone, and expects more travel in the months ahead.

It’s not so much leaving his state that’s a problem (even if Newsom ignores the late Arthur Vanderburg’s counsel that “politics ends at the water’s edge”), as it is Newsom’s lack of follow-up and follow-through with matters back home.

In case you missed it, there’s a pattern to Newsom’s wanderlust: The Golden State’s governor heads elsewhere in America or overseas, thus stoking the presidential buzz in his ongoing game of trolling President Donald Trump, only to return to California and to stage a public display of his commitment to his day job in Sacramento.

It happened in November 2023, not long after a Newsom China tour most memorable for Newsom plowing over a kid on a Beijing basketball court (as in politics, the progressive governor driving hard to the left). On his return, he held a Los Angeles media availability during which the governor informed reporters that a fire that had shut down a portion of 10 Freeway was the work of an arsonist.

The pattern repeated itself this month, on the heels of Newsom’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the governor showing up in rural Kern County to hail the progress of California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project. (Appropriately for a dumpster fire of a transit plan, a fire broke out at a rail construction site the following day).

Watch for more of the same in the weeks ahead, as Newsom promotes his forthcoming memoir about his formative years in Marin County (which includes a stop in early-primary New Hampshire). California’s governor will return home and find a way to claim that he’s conquering his state’s myriad woes.

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The problem is Newsom’s at least one-third shy of Caesar’s boast: He’s not so much a conqueror as he is a conveyor of problems that will be sitting in his successor’s in-box.

Take the case of the freeway fire. Yes, the 10 reopened weeks ahead of schedule. But the arsonist never was arrested, despite the impression that an arrest was nigh.

As for high-speed rail, there is no proverbial light at the end of a tunnel for a project that, in 17 years’ time, has yet to have a mile of track laid, and whose financial records are veiled in secrecy. 

Proof that someone in state government has a sense of humor: Rather than being touted as a convenient way to get between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the bullet train’s brain trust now pitches it as a great way to see Yosemite, even though the nearest planned stop would be 70 miles away from the park.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of a Newsom record that wavers between incomplete and incongruous.

Come summertime and a deal to enact a new state budget, Newsom likely will boast that California’s finances are in fine fettle. 

Never mind that the next governor likely will be swimming in a sea of red ink during his or her first term thanks to a structural deficit made possible by years of Newsom-signed budgets in which spending outpaced revenue and inflation. 

Come the fall and California’s bill-signing season, look to Newsom to cite progress on California’s lack of affordable housing –– “affordability” being the new drinking game keyword for Democratic presidential hopefuls. 

What the governor will conveniently omit: a 2019 “Marshall Plan” for housing that never lived up to its promise of 3.5 million new units under Newsom’s watch (hopefully a better fate awaits another Newsom “Marshall Plan” –– this one, for Los Angeles’ current fire recovery).

As for the human misery on California’s streets, that ongoing policy failure is more chronic than it is seasonal. It’s now 22 years since then-mayor Newsom rolled out a 10-year plan to end homelessness in San Francisco. While the governor took a victory lap last month for a 9% drop in unsheltered homeless from the previous year, homelessness is in fact up 14% statewide during his tenure.

The irony is hard to overlook: While Newsom travels abroad assuring the world that “Donald Trump is temporary,” he, too, is a temporary fixture on the California stage –– a term-limited governor with 10-plus months remaining in office. 

Each day Newsom spends outside the Golden State is one less day he could have stayed at home, addressing a Swiss-cheese record that will come under scrutiny if indeed he attempts to succeed Trump.

Otherwise, the same California governor eager to take his talents to the early presidential primary states is the living manifestation of a Robert Frost poem: Gavin Newsom has many miles to go –– and far too many promises unkept.

Bill Whalen is the Hoover Institution’s Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism and former chief speechwriter for California Gov. Pete Wilson.