In his nakedly shameless bid for the 2028 presidential nomination, California Gov. Gavin Newsom will need all the luck he can muster. Newsom’s biggest political headache cannot be resolved – it’s Newsom himself.  The internet has stored 20 years of his out-of-the-mainstream policy posit ions, providing his fellow Democratic nomination seekers with a treasure trove of fodder to use against him.  And in the unlikely event he can outperform Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, or Maryland’s Wes Moore, Newsom’s two decades of failure will be his undoing. Whoever survives what promises to be an expensive, bitter Democratic campaign would face an uphill race against Vice President J.D. Vance or Florida Gov. Ron de Santis in 2028. Newsom’s newly launched podcast “This is Gavin,” which features conservative guests that he often purports to agree with, cannot resolve the formidable challenges he faces from within his own party and against Republican opposition. Beginning in 2004 when, supported by prominent national Democratic Party partisans that included Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson and California’s most powerful politician, Willie Brown, Newsom breezed into the San Francisco mayor’s office.  During his 2004 election campaign and his 2008 re-election bid, Newsom promised to fix California’s homeless, affordable housing, and public education problems. Two decades after Newsom made his 2004 promise, California’s homeless population grew more than any other state’s.  While the national homeless population decreased by 18% between 2010 and 2020, California’s increased by 31%.  The troubling trend continued from 2020 to 2022, when California’s homeless population grew by 6% while the rest of the country saw an increase of less than 0.5%. California spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years.  With $17.5 billion, California could have, theoretically, paid the rent for every homeless person in California for those four years, even at the state’s high home costs. Despite the massive outlay to end or at least abate homelessness, the state’s street population grew.  More than 175,000 homeless people now live in California, a total that remarkably could represent an undercount that misses residents sleeping in their cars or who are huddled away out of view. With just 22 months remaining in his governorship, Newsom knows two interrelated promises he made to voters seven years ago — to erase or at least lessen the state’s chronic housing shortage and its extremely high homelessness rate — will not happen before he leaves Sacramento.  His pledges were foolish campaign posturing. State government has little ability to build housing or upgrade homelessness’ economic plight. The third of Newsom’s campaign vows, to improve the results of California’s public-school students, could be his biggest failure. From a parent’s perspective, public education is a catastrophe.  California’s Department of Education has done some fancy footwork to put a positive spin on how students are evaluated, changing the labels for the different levels measuring students. Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser to the advocacy group Children Now, said the new labels would feed the “reality gap in the perceptions of parents that their kids are doing better than they are” in school.  Regardless of the terminology used, California ranks next-to-last, 49th, among the states in college preparedness as measured by high school seniors’ scores on the ACT and SAT tests. Newsom’s record on his biggest campaign promises is zero for three – a strikeout not only in baseball but also in politics.  This thumbnail summary is exclusive of California’s high living cost, where a $200,000 annual income is, in some areas, classified as middle class.  The state is also suffering from rampant “smash-and-grab” robberies, his mangled handling of Los Angeles’ deadly wildfires, and sanctuary state status that now provides budget-busting Medi-Cal for all illegal aliens, a benefit that the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates will cost taxpayers $6.5 billion annually and “will only go up,” said Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones. If Newsom can fashion a winning presidential campaign out of his dismal string of broken promises, then he is either truly a political magician or voters are blind to reality. Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. His column is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. The post Joe Guzzardi | Gavin Newsom’s Biggest Problem Is Gavin Newsom appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal. ...read more read less