t’s hard to deny that Gov. Gavin Newsom harbors garish and even cringeworthy presidential ambitions. The California Democrat regularly trolls Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a top 2024 GOP contender, and Newsom surely knows playing foil to DeSantis will generate media buzz about his own similar prospects.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
But Newsom’s role as a leading DeSantis antagonist also serves a little-noticed purpose. It’s filling a void among Democrats, by making a big argument to the Democratic base — and perhaps to the country — about ongoing GOP radicalization and red-state cruelty that most Democrats cannot or will not make in quite the way Newsom can.
This week, Newsom sharply attacked DeSantis’s ugly transporting of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Newsom also extended an offer of disaster aid to hurricane-ravaged Florida, amid extensive media discussion of DeSantis’s 2013 vote in Congress against similar aid for hurricane victims elsewhere.
And on Thursday night, Newsom signed a new law creating a kind of sanctuary for transgender kids and families fleeing draconian red-state anti-trans laws, an area in which DeSantis has excelled. In all three cases, the effect was to demonstrate a set of blue-state values that contrast sharply with the reactionary turn we’re seeing in many Republican-led states.
Image without a caption
Follow Greg Sargent's opinions
Follow
While blasting DeSantis’s migrants stunt, Newsom pointedly noted that the move was “cruel” to the children among the transported migrants. Newsom asked the Justice Department to investigate potential violations of federal law, and he ripped perpetrators of such stunts as “bullies.”
DeSantis — and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has bused more than 10,000 migrants to blue strongholds — say they’re demonstrating that supporters of generous national policies toward asylum seekers are hypocritically foisting their burden on border states.
That premise is nonsense: A large share of migrants awaiting asylum hearings are already in California and in other blue states. And so, in ripping DeSantis’s cruelty, Newsom is demonstrating that blue states support a welcoming national posture toward migrants even though it’s burdening their states.
The DeSantis-Abbott stunts are not about managing a practical problem. As CNN’s Ron Brownstein points out, they are about demonstrating a red-blue contrast in values, through the literal deportation of migrants from red states to blue states.
Home
Chat
Login
Register