And he's off
Newsom's inaugural speech leaves progressives waiting and wondering where the 'common ground' really lies

By Steven T. Jones

During his opening days in office, Mayor Gavin Newsom issued "a call for common ground" and filled a few of the hundreds of vacant slots in his administration, but he has yet to offer specifics as to his political priorities or how he intends to reach out to the progressives who opposed him, as he pledged to do on election night.

"We're all just kind of waiting," San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Matt Gonzalez told the Bay Guardian. "Our approach will depend on how Newsom comes out of the gate."

Newsom press secretary Peter Ragone – a 33-year-old Democratic Party operative who comes to the Mayor's Office from serving as spokesperson for the campaign against the Gray Davis recall, and before that, Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign – denies the new mayor is still a mystery.

"There's a clear path that he wants to forge," Ragone said, citing the 14 issue papers Newsom's transition team wrote and the 21 policy papers that Newsom touted on the campaign trail. "The next step is to synthesize those things to create policy outcomes."

Yet his transition-team papers (which you can read at www.gavinnewsom.com/transition_page/webpages/report.html) and his campaign documents (www.gavinnewsom.com/issues.html) reveal a vast, vague, and often contradictory array of political goals, lacking key details and ways to pay for them (see "Dissecting the Newsom Agenda," 11/19/03). And let's not forget that these papers were written by people other than Newsom and those who will actually implement city policies.

So until Newsom makes some policy speeches and fills out his administration with people whose backgrounds and allegiances can be assessed, the only thing there is to go on right now is his inaugural speech, "A Call for Common Ground" (www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_page.asp?id=22090), which we got a couple of California's leading experts on political communication to help us analyze.

Their take: Newsom, leader of one of the country's most progressive cities, at best sounds like a John Edwards-style moderate Democrat – and sometimes sounds like the new Republican governor.

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The speech, delivered to a mostly supportive crowd of thousands Jan. 8 from the steps of City Hall, starts by celebrating "a city that gave each person the freedom to grow, speak, live and to love without the fear and bigotry that poisons so much of this world" before calling for an end to the political polarization that divides San Franciscans (for more details on the day, see the "Pomp and Platitudes" entry on the Bay Guardian's Web log, dev.sfbg.com/politics).

"We have factions of the business community blaming the government, and factions of the government blaming the business community," Newsom said. "Do we want to find someone to blame – or do we want to find solutions? I say it's time to start working together to find common purpose and common ground. Because fundamentally, I want to make this administration about solutions. We've proven that we can fight each other to a draw. We know how to stop things, that's for sure. Now the challenge is to start a process of change that will help us unite around proven ideas."

Yet some of Newsom's "proven ideas" in such controversial realms as homeless policy, economic development, planning standards, revenue generation, health and welfare programs, and civil rights are opposed by half of San Francisco voters to Newsom's left. So finding "common purpose" while dismissing "ideological battles" and even "legitimate disagreements," as he did in his speech, could be tough.

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Then again, inaugural addresses are usually more about setting the tone than setting policy, according to both Barbara O'Connor, head of the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media and a political communication professor at California State University, Sacramento, and Tom Hollihan, a political communication professor and the associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

"After a divisive campaign, the inaugural speech is really meant to heal those divisions," Hollihan told us. "This is a textbook model of how to give such a speech, because at every turn, it seeks to be conciliatory."

In many respects, both said, it was a similar speech to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inaugural address. O'Connor went even further than Hollihan, saying that Newsom and the governor employ similar tactics for reaching a public that holds politicians in low esteem and has tired of partisan battles.

"I think the general theme, common ground, could have come out of Governor Schwarzenegger's mouth," O'Connor said. "It's a good rhetorical vision for the speech, but you need to make sure there are enough specifics to warrant that theme."

In the governor's case, early calls for unity have been belied by some autocratic moves to bypass the legislature and by a budget based on traditionally Republican values. In Newsom's case, there was nothing in his speech to indicate how and when he'll compromise with progressives (or even if he will, given that the political dichotomy outlined in his speech was between government and the business community, not the progressive community).

"It's the next speech that will be telling, when he says what he'll do. It will be interesting to see what his conflict-resolution model will be," O'Connor said. "Your city is one of the most divided of any city in the country, and people there take politics very seriously."

Hollihan agreed there was little in the speech for either pundits or progressives to grab onto. On the current political continuum, he said the basic themes were in the moderate-liberal range, comparing them to the ground Edwards has staked out in the Democratic presidential primary.

"It's a politically moderate speech. It does not have a clarion call for radical reform," Hollihan said. "If the speech has anything concrete in it, it's the notion of dialogue."

But even there, Newsom isn't calling for a dialogue with progressives but for one between the moderates who have traditionally run city hall and the more conservative business community. Hollihan said the speech seemed to reflect a belief by Newsom that he's not going to face significant challenges from the left.

"He is going to have some time before they give him much grief," Hollihan said. "I think he's making a decision that there's no place for those people to go right now."

That could turn out to be a very dangerous – and divisive – position.

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