JOEL KOTKIN: Slouching Toward Gavin Newsom. “Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood ‘hustling’ and that he ‘raised himself.’ That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer. In 1991, a young Newsom was photographed with the Getty children as part of a newspaper story titled ‘The Children of the Rich.’ It’s unlikely that the San Francisco elite, who have financed his ruse, are fooled; nor is anyone else for that matter. Yet the act goes on, without a hint of shame.”