Gavin Newsom stumps in San Diego

There was a moment Wednesday evening in City Heights when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom actually became Barack Obama.

Close your eyes and imagine Obama saying these words, with the president’s signature pointed punctuation at the end of sentences and folksy Southern affection:

“I do truancy visits. This is not something mayors tend to do. I show up to people’s homes with principals and knock on their door. Trust me, I know. I know.”

That was Newsom, setting up an anecdote about visiting a low-income home and meeting a 16-year-old girl who hadn’t been attending school, it turned out, because she was too busy caring for her pregnant 14-year-old sister because her mother was suffering from severe depression. Obama would not have pronounced it “Aye know. Aye know”; he would have said “Ah know. Ah know.” And so it was with Newsom, who not only seemed to be channeling the president, but also mentioning his name repeatedly as someone who truly “gets it.”

Like Obama, Newsom is thin and blessed with movie-star good looks, and like Obama, he talks about “politicians” as if he were not one himself, setting himself apart from politicians who say one thing in public and the opposite in private.

Newsom began his town-hall meeting in the Monroe Clark Middle School auditorium with an Obamaesque message of hope: “I recognize—you all recognize—that these are challenging times and, again, very fearful times. But my spirit of the night is a spirit of a little more optimism, that we’re much more united than the politics and the punditry will suggest, that folks all over the state are feeling a lot like you down here in this part of the state.”

Newsom told reporters Wednesday that he’s exploring the possibility that he’ll run for governor next year, traveling up and down the state to find out if Californians’ concerns match his own. Internal campaign research has shown that he is a politically viable candidate, he said.

But there’s no chance anyone walked away from his town-hall meeting at the Monroe Clark Middle School auditorium doubting that he’ll run. This guy’s in.

And he’s running as far to the left as any serious candidate can go. His meeting, which lasted one hour and two minutes and allowed seven questions from the audience, was generally about universal healthcare, early-childhood education and repairing communities from the ground up.

He touted San Francisco’s public health plan, which, he said, has provided care to 65 percent of those who were previously uninsured, regardless of preexisting conditions or ability to pay. “I’m for single-payer,” he said flatly. “And why am I for single-payer? ’Cause we’re doing it in San Francisco. And guess what—it’s reduced our costs. ’Cause I’m not worried about insurance companies, and I’m not worried about reimbursements, and I’m not getting into lawsuits, and I’m not creating a new bureaucracy. We have no new bureaucracy with our healthcare plan. No new taxes. Listen to this: no new general-fund costs.”

He praised San Francisco voters’ approval of a ballot measure creating a “rainy-day fund” that, Newsom said, has been spent on guaranteeing that no teacher gets laid off.

He stressed arts education, childhood nutrition, environmentalism (saying that despite leading the nation in efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, California isn’t going far enough), high-speed rail and other types of public transit and prison reform.

But is he really that liberal?

Steven T. Jones, city editor of the progressive alternative weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, said Newsom is “someone who uses liberal language but is basically a pro-business Democrat.” He’s more like Bill Clinton than Obama, Jones remarked.

Jones said it was Tom Ammiano, who, as San Francisco County supervisor, spearheaded the health program, getting “the shit beat out of him by the business community for almost a year while he lined up the votes,” and Newsom jumped aboard the bandwagon afterward.

“Newsom is downtown’s boy, and the progressives here all hate him,” Jones said. “The guy’s all talk.”

Some of Newsom’s critics, a group of African-Americans, have followed Newsom around the state in hopes of confronting the mayor about a controversial development project in the low-income Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood. Newsom lightheartedly referred to the group as “friends” who’ve been traveling with the campaign and said he’d get to their concerns later in the session, but he never did.

Jones said the “Hunter’s Point people are mad that [Newsom], Dianne Feinstein and Lennar Corp. rammed through a massive development plan for Bayview and Hunter’s and Candlestick points that will gentrify the areas, turn Superfund sites into toxic public parks, subsidize a new stadium for the 49ers and drive the last of the black people out of the city.”

But the small crowd in San Diego received Newsom with open arms and several rounds of applause, the largest coming near the end of the evening, when the final questioner asked the mayor, who’s become famous for his stance in favor of gay marriage, how he would respond to people who resist social change. Newsom ended with a flourish:

“I say to folks,” he said, “think about that, as Dr. King said, that ‘long arch of history.’ Think about, as Dr. King said, that ‘web of mutuality that binds us all together.’ Think about our proudest moments in American history—and certainly within the Democratic Party—when we stood on the principle of civil rights, of human rights, of the rights of women and gender equality, and we stood on the principle, as this court did, of the rights of the gay and lesbian community. Those are the proudest moments in our nation.”