POLITICS: Why does Newsom ramble?

Politicians ramble because often, the game rewards it. 

Rambling can be smart evasion: Say too little and you’re perceived as evasive; say too much and the question disappears in a cloud of words.

Problem is, the rest of us get fairy dust in lieu of answers to real-world issues. 

Enter Gavin Newsom. 

Pressed for an answer or comment, he’ll pivot to a safer topic, bury the hot potato under stats and stories, or loop through abstract ideals until the interviewer loses the will to live. Classic moves — a real phony.

The latest example? The gov’s appearance on Adam Friedland’s podcast the other day. The host asked the most basic question imaginable: “Vote for you (Newsom) and you get what?”

Any normal candidate would rattle off three priorities and call it a day. Newsom, however, treated it like an invitation to deliver the Sermon on the Mount by way of a community-college philosophy seminar.

He declared himself a “Sargent Shriver Democrat,” channeled the “spirit of the ’60s,” then casually name-dropped Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela into his personal “why.” 

Friedland’s flat “What??” was the only honest response possible. Millions who watched the clip later agreed: Newsom is bizarre.

The man sounded like he was auditioning to be the next civil-rights emoji, not explaining why anyone should vote for him.

In too many respects, Newsom offers a masterclass in avoidance. Once he was the golden boy of West Coast liberalism: telegenic, articulate, effortlessly smooth and oh that hair!

Yet he’s spent the last couple of years morphing into a walking advertisement for verbal overindulgence sprinkled with a flip-flop here and a pander there.

Is he running for president in 2028? Yes! Well, maybe not. Didn’t he pretty much rule out a run? But maybe this actually means yes. It’s like his excuse for dining at the French Laundry despite his own COVID lockdown protocols: just drop your mask between bites.

His style has become a curious hybrid: Biden’s meandering self-corrections meets Harris’s abstract buzzword loops, with an extra layer of self-important historical cosplay thrown in for good measure.

Today’s media love sound bites, and politicians seem to ramble in search of one. Longer answers let them hammer talking points, dunk on opponents, or sprinkle in folksy anecdotes for that “authentic” vibe. 

Sometimes it’s personality: the desire to sound profound, the fear of dead air, or just plain discomfort with brevity.

Bottom line: Crisp answers are high-risk, high-reward; word salad is low-risk, medium-annoyance. Voters may roll their eyes, but the politician usually walks away unscathed. 

The real fun starts when the microscopes arrive. Put any politician, or his loudest cheerleaders, under sustained scrutiny and watch the polish crack. 

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Debate stages, hostile podcasts, viral gotcha clips, street confrontations: Suddenly their rehearsed lines evaporate, replaced by repetition, tangents, defensive spirals, or outright word vomit. 

Many simply fall apart because the moment demands real-time thinking, not memorized scripts. 

And Newsom is no different.

Like Biden, whose off-script moments increasingly featured trailing thoughts, factual slips, abrupt pivots, and the occasional “anyway” that signaled he’d lost the thread, Newsom can’t seem to stay on rails when the stakes rise.

His default mode is to overexplain: history lessons, stats dumps, and family anecdotes, all layered until the original point is buried under an avalanche of verbiage. 

In tough interviews or live settings, he almost never lands a fast, concise zinger.

He just … keeps … going.

Listeners tire; critics clip; the mockery writes itself.

And then there’s the profanity. Once upon a time Newsom spoke in complete, measured sentences fit for prime time. These days he swears like a sailor who just stubbed his toe.

He recently told Louisiana’s attorney general to “go f— yourself” over an abortion lawsuit threat. When Sean Hannity hit him with racism accusations tied to offhand 960 SAT-score comments, Newsom fired back online: “Spare me your fake f—ing outrage.”

It’s clearly an attempt to sound raw, combative, anti-elite: a tough-guy populism from a guy who owns multiple vineyards.

The problem? It comes across less like authenticity and more like a politician who’s run out of answers and decided vulgarity will do the trick.

Paired with the rambling and the historical fan fiction, it just makes him look volatile and unserious. 

After years surrounded by yes-men Democrats and compliant media in Sacramento, Newsom is slowly getting hit with the reality stick. 

Even mainstream reporters are catching on to his nonsensical ramblings and embellishments. 

We’ve seen this fairy-dust act before; we’ve learned our lesson and we see the truth: Newsom may well be incapable of giving the direct, candid and sensible answers we need as a nation.

Richie Greenberg is a political commentator based in San Francisco.