After months of uncertainty about the State of the State Address this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom eschewed tradition in favor of a prerecorded speech that devoted significant airtime to attacking Republican “California haters” in Congress and across the country.
From gun safety laws and abortion to homelessness and climate change, Newsom covered a grab-bag of hot button political issues Tuesday morning to distinguish California from red states.
“The California way of life is under attack. For conservatives and delusional California bashers, their success depends on our failure,” Newsom said in the speech that was streamed online.
Originally, Newsom’s State of the State Address was scheduled for after the March primary election, but it was postponed when the results for Proposition 1, the mental health ballot measure he championed, remained too close to call.
While the traditional address acts as both a victory lap and a look toward the future, Newsom spent most of the 28-minute speech on the former.
The tight budget deal approved over the weekend received a brief mention from Newsom, which he described as “a disciplined approach that keeps the state on a strong fiscal footing.”
He also touted the dozens of reforms he signed to the California Environmental Quality Act, one of which was cited in a state Supreme Court case earlier this month to allow UC Berkeley to construct housing on the historic site of People’s Park.
His administration has gone after local governments that fail to produce adequate housing plans — Newsom counted 442 instances in his address.
An example for others
To address crime and gun violence, Newsom pointed to the state’s stricter gun laws and recent drops in crime in cities that are often maligned by right-wing media, such as San Francisco and Oakland.
“The red state refusal to follow our lead has had catastrophic impacts. Let’s put it this way: If every state in America had California’s gun death rate over the past decade, 140,000 more Americans would be alive today.”
As Newsom weaved through the various policy issues of his address, he refuted Republican “inertia, politics and pure political pandering” at every step.
But despite his initial attacks on Republican lawmakers, Newsom also tried to capture a spirit of political unity by the end of his address, defining California as “a place that can elect Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown back-to-back.”
“We are the state that launched a farmworker revolution, a free speech revolution, a love revolution, a computing revolution, a biotech revolution, a climate revolution, and a quantum revolution,” Newsom said. “That’s us: Weird, wild, free-spirited California.”