Bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.

Actually, this is less a ‘strategy’ for Gavin Newsom than a recognition of reality. Newsom clearly has designs on the presidency, either in 2028 or (ahem) sooner, but either way his career rests on California’s performance. Given the decade-plus collapse of its second-largest urban center, a trend that started while Newsom was mayor and continued through two terms as governor, Newsom has no choice but to fix the problem.

So now, Politico reports, Newsom has all but taken over as mayor of the city as everyone flees the results of the policies Newsom employs:

“I feel like I’m being pulled back to being mayor,” Newsom said in an interview.

Through some combination of civic pride, personal obligation and an antenna for his own political liabilities, he’s immersed himself in the city’s struggles. He sent in state law enforcement to target fentanyl trafficking at the request of the mayor, London Breed, and huddled with Bay Area business and civic leaders, inviting them to vent their frustrations about the decline of the city’s urban core. He is actively involved with planning for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit coming to downtown San Francisco in November — with world and corporate leaders converging and local officials nervously working to get their collective house in order. …

Newsom, in his last term as governor and widely viewed as a future White House aspirant, is at the center of that debate. As San Francisco goes, so goes California. And as California goes, so goes Newsom.

“I am mindful of the critics — and I’m one of them — that we can be doing more and better in myriad areas,” he said. “I’m mindful that as governor, I can’t do it all. But I’m also mindful that the buck stops here. And I’m ultimately going to be held to account.”

As California goes? It’s still going. Newsom and the decades-long Democrat supermajority grip on power have accomplished what had been thought to be impossible: a net outflow from the Golden State. For the first time ever, the population change has turned negative in Newsom’s state, so much so that California lost a House seat in 2022 for the first time ever. Newsom has inadvertently highlighted that exodus by attempting to chase down California refugees in Texas and Florida to argue that they’re making a bad choice, largely to gales of laughter.

That trend is even worse in San Francisco. In other parts of California, businesses are slowly relocating out of the cities as crime rates increase and urban DAs refuse to prosecute them. That process has turned into a stampede in San Francisco as retailers either have to lock down all of their goods or close entirely. It’s been almost impossible to keep up with the major-store closings in that city, but when Whole Foods decides that a San Francisco store isn’t worth the risk, that’s a watershed moment — or should be, for officials who don’t live in denial.

And don’t forget that even the Biden administration declared its own federal offices in San Francisco — the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building — a no-go zone for federal workers this week.

However, San Francisco is just the reductio of the ad absurdum of progressive control of California, which very much includes Newsom. Their energy policies are just as disastrous as their crime policies, turning a state with abundant resources into a third-world entity, offering rolling blackouts and brownouts as normalcy. Their latest plan to resolve this includes adding an avalanche of demand to the grid with electric vehicles, and then using their batteries to deal with the increased demand. It’s exactly as insane as it sounds.

Eventually, Los Angeles and San Diego will turn into San Francisco under these policies, and everyone knows it. That’s why people with the means to do so are leaving while they still have some value left in their property. Under Newsom and Democrats, California is hollowing out its middle classes, leaving only the poor and the ultra-wealthy and no economic dynamism whatsoever. That’s the end result of progressivism; San Francisco just got there first.

This is why Newsom’s standing as a Plan B post-Joe Biden is entirely laughable. Put aside his flagrant COVID masking hypocrisy at the French Laundry, his personal hypocrisy on red-state travel bans, and his hypocrisy over mandated COVID vaccines for children. Newsom is not just a hypocrite, he’s an incompetent fool with a track record of nothing but failure. As mayor, Newsom accelerated the decline of San Francisco, and as governor, Newsom has accelerated the decline of the entire state of California. He’s the only California governor to lose a House seat in reapportionment. People are already voting against him with their feet in his own state.

Now Newsom wants to park himself in San Francisco to save his career. It’s worth recalling where Newsom’s attention had been before the media started taking notice of the city’s collapse. As I noted above, Newsom was touring Texas and Florida, trying to goad Ron DeSantis into a debate, rather than paying attention to the disastrous conditions in his own state. Now that the city he helped run into the ground has become a national cautionary tale, suddenly Newsom is interested in doing his own job instead of ankle-biting popular governors of successful states.

Newsom is every bit as incompetent and clownish as Joe Biden. His only upside is a lack of senility, but that’s a very low bar, even for Democrats these days. I often say that Joe Biden is twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag; Newsom is just proof that you can stack those bags pretty high.