Gavin Newsom’s Nation-State
LOS ANGELES—California is ascendant and its governor, Gavin Newsom, knows it. His state is having dramatic success in containing the coronavirus pandemic, and Newsom is so bullish about its status that he talks about California as if it were one of the world’s most powerful nations, not merely the largest state.
“I hope we’re modeling good behavior,” Newsom told me the other day, when I caught up with him by phone from Sacramento, as he was planning a multistate response to the crisis with his fellow Democratic governors in Oregon and Washington State. “Look, we’re the fifth largest economy in the world, 40 million strong, we’re as diverse a state as exists in this country, [with] 20-some percent of the state foreign-born.” In other words, California amounts to a kind of country unto itself, and is just responding accordingly.
This month, Newsom, whose March 19 mandatory stay-at-home order was the first in the country, invoked California’s power as a “nation-state” to announce that it would lend 500 state-owned ventilators to other COVID-19 hot spots in need, and would use its immense budget surplus to start an almost $1 billion supply chain from China to import 200 million respiratory and surgical masks.
Newsom’s moves—and those of other blue-state governors who have taken the lead in confronting the crisis
