Next, he brought out a stack of canary-yellow index cards, thick as a sandwich. It was covered in his scrawl. From the lined pages, he distills the material and copies things a second time onto the cards. “And, from here, it goes in right in there,” he said, gesturing to his head.
This process of underlining, copying, and recopying is the backbone of Newsom’s working life. He spends his ninety-minute commute—between Kentfield, in Marin, where he lives with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four children, and Sacramento, where he usually overnights once or twice a week—making notations in the back seat of the gubernatorial S.U.V. Between meetings and after dinner, the pads and cards come out. What he described as the resulting “hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands” of pieces of paper lived for a while as ballast in the trunk of his car. Today, they occupy an unofficial archive off the Governor’s office, with a filing system of his own conception. If an adviser tells Newsom something that strikes him as odd, he has been known to vanish into his archive, emerge with a folder (“There are, like, tabs and things,” Jason Elliott told me with horror), and extract a note proving that, months ago, the same adviser told him something else.
Because of his reading struggles, Newsom rarely gives long written speeches; instead, he memorizes. (He sees the lines of text on a teleprompter screen as a single image, like a Chinese character, which he uses to recall the next line.) Lindsey Cobia told me, “A four-hour podcast where he gets asked about everything from U.F.O.s to his policy on assisted suicide is actually a more comfortable space for him, because of his dyslexia, than reading a ten-minute speech.” Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area congresswoman, who shared consultants with Newsom during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, recalled that they left to help him with speech prep—normally a half-hour task. “ I didn’t see them for, like, three hours,” she said. “He wanted to do it over and over.”
Simon met Newsom twenty-five years ago, when she was the director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an organization representing girls in the juvenile-justice system. She was chanting with a bullhorn outside his office in protest of his approach to welfare. “The electeds never come out to see you,” she said. But Newsom did, and he listened to the protesters’ grievances for an hour. “At the end, he said, ‘My office is always open to all of you.’ ” Simon began watching his press conferences. “I would tell my members, ‘Write his stats down, and let’s check them—because he has no notes!’ ” Newsom’s stats checked out; he can “drill down,” as he put it, on almost any subject at the slightest invitation. He sometimes gives the impression of a man with more stamina for talking than people have for listening.
On the campaign trail, Newsom has a mental stack of cue cards that he riffs on the way a jazz pianist might improvise from a chord chart. His movements through the language can be weird. (“The rule of law, not the rule of Don, and I hope it’s dawning on people” is a construction that he has found fit to repeat on air.)
“Prove to me you can be nice to people.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Hilary, who is now the co-president of PlumpJack, sees his displays of esoteric knowledge as compensatory. In the family, she was thought to take after their brilliant, charismatic father. “My mom was incredibly shy, and always told everyone that Gavin was just like her—but she was super critical of herself,” she said. “I think there was this quiet rebellion in him that wanted to say, I’m not like that.” In high school, he began slicking his hair, wearing suits, and carrying a briefcase, inspired by the TV show “Remington Steele.” He was trying to channel the era’s buffed iconography of masculine power, but came off like Alex P. Keaton. “I remember paying him five dollars to go to the Levi’s store in San Rafael with me and get a pair of Shrink-to-Fit jeans, because I’m, like, ‘You’re bad for my luck in high school,’ ” Hilary said. In light of his trajectory from problem child to aloof entrepreneur, Newsom, who is said to be planning a run for higher office, has an opportunity to become America’s first Gen X President.
