Gavin Newsom aims to stay relevant like FDR

Anita Chabria, Tribune News Service

Proposition 50 has passed, and with it goes the warm spotlight of never-ending press coverage that aspiring presidential contender Gavin Newsom has enjoyed. What's an ambitious governor to do? My vote? Take inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who not only pulled America through the Depression, but rebuilt trust in democracy with a truly big-tent government that offered concrete benefits to a wide and diverse swath of society. It's time to once again embrace the values — inclusiveness, equity, dignity for all — that too many Democrats have expeditiously dropped to appease MAGA. Not only did FDR make good on helping the average person, he put a sign on it (literally — think of all those Work Projects Administration logos that still grace our manhole covers and sidewalks) to make sure everyone knew that big, bold government wasn't the problem, but the solution — despite what rich men wanted the public to believe.

As he was sworn in for his second term (of four, take that President Trump!), FDR said he was "determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern," because the "test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." Roosevelt created jobs paid for by government; he created Social Security; he created a coalition that improbably managed to include both Black Americans everywhere and white Southerners, northern industrialists and rural farmers. In the end, he created a United States where people could try, fail and have the helping hand to get back up again — the real underpinning of the American dream. The similarities between Roosevelt's day and now aren't perfect, but they share a shoe size. FDR took office in 1933, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Then, like now, right-wing authoritarianism was cuddled up with the oligarchs. Income inequality was undeniable (and worse, unemployment was around 25%) and daily life was just plain hard.

That discontent, then and now, led to political polarization as need sowed division, and leaders with selfish agendas channeled fear into anger and anger into power. Like then, the public today is desperate for security, and unselfish, service leadership — not that of "economic royalists," as FDR described them. He warned then, in words sadly timeless, that "new kingdoms" were being "built upon concentration of control over material things."

"They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction," FDR said when accepting the presidential nomination for the second time.

"We're in a similar moment now," said New Deal expert Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at UC Davis. But Roosevelt wasn't just fighting what was wrong, he pointed out. He "wanted to show people that he was going to not put things back the way they were, but actually make things better."

Like then, America today isn't just looking to overcome. Despite the relentless focus on cost of living, there is also hunger for a return to fairness. Even cowed by our personal needs, there is still in most of us that belief that Ronald Reagan articulated well: We aspire to be the "shining city upon a hill ... teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace." Washington, D.C., resident Sean Dunn distilled that sentiment for the modern moment recently, standing outside a courthouse after being found not guilty of a misdemeanor for throwing a turkey sandwich at an immigration officer.

"Every life matters, no matter where you came from, no matter how you got here, no matter how you identify," Dunn said. "You have the right to live a life that is free." But America needs to pay the bills and affordability is fairly the top concern for many. Voters want a concrete plan for personal financial stability — like FDR offered with the New Deal — grounded in tangible benefits such as healthcare, housing, jobs and affordable Thanksgiving turkeys that do not require lining up at a food bank.

The Republicans understand only part of this complicated mix — the affordability angle. Though, like the robber barons of the Roaring '20s, MAGA elite are finding it increasingly difficult to dismantle government and strip the American people of their wealth while simultaneously pretending they care. Trump made a big to-do about the price of Walmart's Thanksgiving meal this year, about $40 to serve 10 people (though it comes with fewer items than last year, and mostly Walmart house brand instead of name brands). Walmart "came out and they said Trump's Thanksgiving dinner, same things, is 25% less than Biden's," he said. "But we just lost an election, they said, based on affordability."

Billionaire-adjacent Vice President JD Vance summed up that Republican frustration on social media after Democrats won not just Proposition 50, but elections in New Jersey, Virginia and even Mississippi.

"We need to focus on the home front," Vance said, using weirdly coded right-wing nationalist language. "We're going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that's the metric by which we'll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond."

Vance is partially right, but FDR ultimately succeeded because he understood that the stability of American democracy depends not just on paying the bills, but on equality and equity — of everyone having a fair shake at paying them.

Despite all the up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric of our rich, the truth is healthy capitalist societies require "automatic stabilizers," such as unemployment insurance, access to medical care and that Social Security FDR invented, said Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School and another expert on the New Deal. Left or right, Republican or Democrat, Americans want to know that they won't be left out in the cold, literally, if life deals them a bad hand. Of course, Newsom isn't president so all he can do is give us a vision of what that would look like, the way FDR did as governor of New York in the early years of the Great Depression, before moving to the Oval Office.

There's the evergreen refrain that as governor Newsom should stay in his lane and focus on the state, instead of his ambitions. To which I say, that's like shaking your fist at the rear of a bolting horse. Newsom is running for president like Secretariat for the Triple Crown. And since we do in fact need a president, why shouldn't he?

At a time of increasing hunger in our country, California is one of a handful of states that provides no-questions-asked free school lunches to all children, a proven way to combat food insecurity. With Trump not only destroying the scientific institutions that study and control environmental and health safety, California is setting its own standards to protect people and the planet. California has fought to expand access to affordable healthcare; stop the military on our streets and push back against masked police; and it leads our country in livable wages, safety nets, social equality and opportunities for social mobility. The state is doing as much as one state can to offer a new deal to solve old problems.

What if Newsom built off those successes with plans for Day One executive orders? Expansion of trade apprenticeships into every high school? A pathway for "Dreamers" to become citizens?

How about an order requiring nonpartisan election maps? Or declaring firearm violence a public health emergency? Heck, I'd love an executive order releasing the Epstein files, which may be America's most bipartisan issue.