Newsom was in Washington this week, but he wasn’t conferring with John Kerry or anybody else outside of the California delegation. “Politicians aren’t lining up to see me or meet me,” he concedes. Backstage at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner on Wednesday, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi introduced the 36-year-old gay-marriage maven to President George W. Bush. “I won’t be coming out there,” Bush chuckled, allowing that being mayor of San Francisco must be a tough job. “I’m proud of you,” Bush told the lanky young man.
Recalling the encounter, Newsom wasn’t sure Bush knew who he was or what Bush was proud of, but he said the president was “utterly gracious.” That hasn’t been Newsom’s experience lately. He was booed at a St. Patrick’s Day parade-“and those are my friends,” he says, clearly pained. He points out that he and his wife were married in a traditional Irish Catholic ceremony. He’s a lifelong Democrat, but it’s been made clear to him that he won’t be in the forefront of the Kerry campaign, even though he was an early supporter. And when he travels next to New York, he doesn’t expect to be invited to city hall.
“I get it. It’s OK,” he says. “I want to advance my party and take back the White House. Am I going to be showing up front and center at fund-raisers? No. Am I raising money? Yes. I know my role.” Newsom, a restaurant owner and entrepreneur who self-financed his campaign for mayor, says he’ll abide by the party’s wishes. If they want to showcase him at the convention as one of the next generation of leaders, fine, if not, “I’ll valet-park cars in Boston if that’s what they want. I’m not naive. I get it. It’s a tough issue.”
Until Newsom started handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Democrats thought they had found a safe haven in supporting civil unions while opposing gay marriage. Newsom argues the issue was ripe for exploitation before he was even elected and that Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was inevitable. “I may have affected the timing,” he concedes. Bush said in endorsing the amendment that he felt compelled to take action because local officials were taking matters into their own hands.
Newsom didn’t campaign on gay marriage. His activism came about somewhat accidentally after listening to Bush’s State of the Union speech in January. Newsom was in the House chamber as Bush spoke, invited there as Pelosi’s guest. The mayor noticed the fleeting reference Bush made to the sanctity of marriage, but didn’t think that much of it until he filed out of the hall and went to collect his cell phone-routinely removed by guards while visitors are in the chamber. While waiting in line, Newsom overheard the wife of a prominent Republican member of Congress making offensive comments about gay marriage.
Walking out of the Capitol and filled with fresh outrage, Newsom called his top aide. Was there something they could do? Could this prohibition be overturned? His office sent a one-page memo to the county clerk asking what it would take to change the requirements for marriage. Newsom thought it would take weeks to get an answer. She came back the next day and said, simply replace the words applicant and spouse with applicant one and applicant two in the formal documents. It was that easy. More than 4,000 couples were married before the state’s attorney general stepped in a month later and halted the ceremonies.
Newsom isn’t sure himself how this will play out politically. His backers fear that “maybe I could get elected mayor again, but that’s it.” Newsom professes not to care if he has short-circuited his chances for higher office. “Everyone I meet out here seems utterly miserable,” he said over coffee and orange juice with a half dozen reporters in Washington on Thursday morning. His short time in politics has already impressed upon him the fleeting fame of an officeholder. At the unveiling of the portrait of his predecessor, Newsom watched the legendary Willie Brown take his place on the wall among 90 mayors whom Newsom had never even heard of. “You come and go. Maybe you get an elementary school named after you if you do really well. You’re a photo,” he shrugs.
Newsom did not support Howard Dean in his bid for his party’s presidential nomination, but credits him with emboldening Democrats, including himself. “If [Dean] had not run, I wonder if I would have had the courage to do this,” he says. Newsom chatted amiably with Dean’s ex-campaign manager, Joe Trippi, at the correspondents’ dinner. Both were there as guests of CNN. Newsom declined to mention that Trippi hadn’t returned his phone calls and that Dean was the only Democratic presidential candidate who didn’t endorse him for mayor. The Dean campaign didn’t want to offend the Green Party candidate who was Newsom’s main rival.
Time is on Newsom’s side. Polls show younger people are open to gay marriage, and he’s convinced the Democratic Party will eventually be where he is. But change on this magnitude takes not years but decades. “I may not be around for that 20-year moment,” he says. To some he’s a visionary; to others, he’s a man in too big a hurry to rewrite history.
