The front-runner for the Democratic nomination just dropped a memoir…

[Mick]

…we’re doomed, says the author, who continues to say:

If you’re reading a Gavin Newsom memoir for pleasure, you should be first in line for an emergency MRI. His second book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, is out this week and simply cannot be read for enjoyment. It’s like Hillbilly Elegy but for middle-class alcoholics in the Bay Area with close ties to petroleum magnates. It is an exhausting hagiography of yet another man who had an affair while in office. It is not so much a book as it is several hundred pages to endure.

Like clockwork, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination just dropped a memoir. I read it. We’re doomed.

[Genuine Realist]

I do believe Newsom’s latest faux pas before the Black audience in Atlanta – vote for me because I’m as dumb as you are – doomed him

I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness - yeah, and a little looking out for the other fella, too.

[Mick]

I do believe Newsom’s latest faux pas before the Black audience in Atlanta – vote for me because I’m as dumb as you are – doomed him.

Apparently, Newsom’s (and other Democrats) faux pas actually is an exposed pattern that Yale and Princeton researchers have uncovered, Cydney Dupree (Yale) and Susan Fiske (Princeton). They published a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the conclusion: White liberals systematically present themselves as less competent when speaking to Black audiences than when speaking to white ones.

It even has a name: “Competence downshift.”

They analyzed 74 speeches given over 25 years of presidential campaign speeches and they found that Democratic candidates consistently used fewer words associated with intelligence, ability, and status when addressing Black crowds. Republican candidates showed no such pattern. The difference was not random. It was consistent, measurable, and unique to white liberals.

In other words, it wasn’t a bug when Newsom talked down to a Black audience. It was a feature. Newsom built his career through powerful connections, including ties to the Gettys, the Feinstein/Blum/CBRE family and the Pelosis. His dyslexia is real, but he navigated it with private school resources and generational stability, which is a fundamentally different experience than navigating it in an underfunded public school with no safety net.

<p data-t=”{"n":"blueLinks","t":13,"a":"click","b":76}”>When Newsom collapses that distinction to claim kinship with a Black audience in Georgia, he is not being vulnerable. He is borrowing from their story without having to pay for it.</p>

Opinion: Newsom’s ‘play dumb’ routine is not new — in fact, it has a clinical name

[Mick]

He also ticked off the LGBTQ community by stating that the Democratic Party needs to “be more culturally normal” and “less prone to spending a disproportionate amount of time on pronouns and identity.”

Newsom is touring Southern states. It’s exposing some hurdles in his path to 2028.

[Author]

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