What’s more, the usual Democratic playbook is going to hit some roadblocks against Elder, a conservative who is practically engineered to discomfit a self-righteous Bay Area progressive. It is going to be funny watching a rich white guy named “Gavin” sneer at a black man from South Central Los Angeles as a friend of white-nationalist hooliganism. It is going to be positively hilarious to hear a graduate of Crenshaw High School being denounced as a tool of the ultra-wealthy by a San Francisco aristocrat educated — in French, no less — at the Ecole Notre Dame Des Victoires, the sort of thing your family can afford when your father is legal counsel for Getty Oil.

It’s the sage from South Central vs. the schmuck from the French Laundry.

Newsom will pretend he is running against the ghost of Donald Trump, economic injustice and climate change. But what is lacking in California isn’t utopian visions and globe-spanning progressive crusades — it is ordinary competence in down-home governor stuff: crime, budgets, taxes, education, housing, roads. Of course, the French Laundry scandal won’t help: Like Cuomo, Newsom may end up being done in by hubris when incompetence alone would have been grounds for retiring him.