CHANGE TIME REFS FOR SUNDAY PRINTING

Bill Clinton

B. 8/19/46

was a man of great appetite and great ambition when he was governor of Arkansas, a job he accepted at the age of 32

first elected in 1978 for a term from 1/79

.

So it was no surprise when Clinton made a bid for the presidency fourteen years later.

announced 10/91 for the 1992 race

There was skepticism and some criticism at the time about the variant being too big for his pants. But that quickly faded with the growing excitement surrounding the 1992 election and the opening of Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, as longtime confidant Skip Rutherford recalled.

Gavin Newsom can only sigh with jealousy.

The governor of California is

not

run for president. Take him at his word.

Filing deadlines have passed in the key early voting states, Nevada and New Hampshire, and Newsom must know that an attack on President Biden, his fellow Democrat, would almost certainly fail, destroying Newsom’s political future.

Yet the brave governor has acted very much like a presidential candidate, taking to the world stage and bashing the Republican Party’s White House candidates whenever he has the chance. Perhaps he’s positioning himself for a run after his term ends in January 2027.

Either way, California voters are not happy.

A Los Angeles Times/UC Berkeley poll

issued

this

LAST WEEK BEFORE PRINT

Last week, Newsom’s approval rating fell to the lowest point of his nearly five years in office

sworn in 1/7/19

with 44% of respondents having a positive view of their work performance and 49% disapproving.

There could be several explanations; Like barnacles on a ship, the negatives pile up the longer a politician stays in office.

Some on the left are disappointed with Newsom’s handling of the state’s homelessness and mental health crises. Some environmentalists are dissatisfied with the governor’s water policies. (Republicans could never stand Newsom.)

But probably the biggest reason for voter dissatisfaction is the governor’s political wandering eye

.

“A lot of people don’t think California is doing well,” said Mark DiCamillo, who oversaw the poll for The Times and Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

“There’s homelessness and now the budget deficit,” DiCamillo continued. “There are a lot of issues that need attention and they seem to be getting worse, or at least not better, and he’s going to do his own thing.”

Ill will is nothing new. Gov. Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson both sank in the polls when they quit their day jobs to run off and seek the presidency.

Maybe it’s a California thing.

Nationally, t

where incumbent governors have been elected president for the past ninety-plus years

:

Clinton and George W. Bush from Texas. Both ran back home with the blessing of the people.

Rutherford, who oversaw the planning of Clinton’s presidential library, said Arkansas voters were fascinated as they watched “all the people who came to work” for the campaign, “all the national press coming in and out.”

. ,” And “

it became a source of, ‘Wow, we got a guy who now has a chance to win this thing.'”

Bush, whose father

Has been

president, was reluctant even when he used his 1998

governor

re-election campaign to position himself for a bid for the White House. He won his second term in a landslide and soon traveled the country in search of the presidency.

Texans didn’t seem to mind.

A November 1999 poll conducted by the Scripps Howard news service found that 72% of respondents approved of Bush’s performance as governor. The state’s most powerful Democrat, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, who even endorsed Bush for president in 2000, burned Republicans’ bipartisan credentials in a way unthinkable in today’s era of impenetrable partisanship.

“He was just a talkative, friendly character,” says Bruce Buchanan, a longtime Bush watcher and presidential scholar at the University of Texas.

at in

Austin. “Everyone who got close to him came away with that feeling, whether they agreed with his politics or not.”

Maybe Californians aren’t so keen on installing their own in the Oval Office.

After delivering two presidents in the last half

–

century, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and two recent House speakers, Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, national political celebrity may not be what it used to be.

Things may be different in Florida, which has never produced a president.

Even though Ron DeSantis is struggling there, a recent poll finds him trailing former President Trump by a whopping 39 percentage points in Florida’s Republican primary. The Republican primaries haven’t necessarily soured on their governor, now in his second and final term.

In a recent test hit for the 2026 gubernatorial race, DeSantis

‘

wife, Casey, had more than twice as much support as anyone else

potential

candidate tested, said Mike Binder, a political science professor and pollster at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

“It’s clear that the DeSantis brand still has a lot of value,” Binder said.

Perhaps Newsom can ask Florida’s governor for tips on how to run for president without alienating his home state, when the two archrivals are one running for the presidency, the other a little, but on the way. no real debate at the end of the month.

Or Newsom could start over somewhere else, such as in Democratic-leaning Rhode Island. No president has ever been elected from the Ocean State.