As the coronavirus pandemic worsens in California, Governor Gavin Newsom finds himself in the hot seat. A governor who was being praised coast to coast is now being criticized, relentlessly, as he tries to get a handle on the state’s COVID-19 crisis.
The governor came out again today, as he has every day this week, to appeal to Californians’ “better angels,” a phrase he’s been using a lot lately, begging them not to congregate this holiday weekend, pleading with them to wear masks and keep their distance. But questions remain—and we peppered him with them—about enforcement. Letters go out to business owners, who are threatened with code enforcement, but no one is handing out tickets on the street to those who don’t wear masks. Californians are told not to host holiday gatherings this weekend, but there are still protests scheduled, with government permits.
When I asked him again about that mixed messaging, the governor said people should not disobey the law just because they see others doing it and that they should rise to the occasion and not be selfish.
“Do what you think is best not only for you, but for the health of those you love,” Newsom said. “Look at the epidemiology, look at the spread of this virus over the last few weeks, look at the fact that our hospitalization rate has gone up 56% in just two weeks.”
So the governor hopes more Californians will follow the state health laws and help stop the spread, but he admits, he’s not about to send the CHP and National Guard in to make sure they do.
I think they thought this wasn’t needed. Initially people seemed to be behaving themselves and wearing masks, following the rules and the numbers were looking good in California. So the sense, I think, was when we went into shelter in place, people were following the rules and doing what they needed to do because they did not want to become New York. And then we started to reopen, people started relaxing and letting their guard down, and now feeling this is necessary to renew that message.
Clearly, the Governor is reluctant. He’s gotten so much heat from conservatives, from Republicans, from libertarians who think he’s running a police state here. He doesn’t want to go too far. You don’t want to make people mad by handing out tickets and punishing them on the street. He’s said, “I don’t want to do something TO you, I want to do this WITH you,” and that we don’t want to punish, we want to save them and help them with this disease.
Would enforcement work? It depends what level you’re talking about. Certainly if they start giving us tickets for not wearing masks, people will wear masks more just as they fasten their seat belts. I guess the cell phone crackdown in cars never really worked, but that takes time, and this is the kind of thing where there’s not a lot of time. This is a more acute crisis, you can’t wait six months or a year for people’s behavior to change, which is typically how those types of enforcement campaigns work.
So, I think he wants to avoid that and just hope that the cultural norm of wearing a mask and behaving and respecting the lives of others is going to be enough for this to take hold.
Yea, Gov. Newsom really hasn’t. I will say it hasn’t come up so much the last couple of weeks in our availabilities with him, partly because Trump has not been attacking California or Gov. Newsom as of late. The governor has not been asked so much about his relationship with Trump and he really has, for the most part with a couple of exceptions here and there, refrained from getting in those kinds of back-and-forth public attacks. He could be criticizing the President, but he’s really taking the high road, and partly he has said it’s because he wants money from Washington, D.C. He knows he needs money to balance the budget, he wants all the assistance he can get, he needs help paying for testing and I think he just figures it’s not in anyone’s interest for him to engage in that kind of spat.
Cuomo, I guess, can’t resist it, but in Gov. Newsom’s case, I think he just doesn’t see much to gain. If he takes the bait and gives us some sound bite where he blasts Trump, what do you think you’re going to see and hear on the news the rest of the day? Are you going to hear his message is that day about coronavirus, or are you going to hear what Newsom said about Trump. You can bet it’s the ladder.
So they reached the point where they felt that things were getting better, we were ending the shelter in place, there wasn’t as much to say each day. Initially, he tried to have some sort of announcement each time to peg it to. He started running out of things to say and ideas to have. So they sort of scaled it back to two or three per week. Then it became a sort of intermittent occasional thing with no real schedule.
As this spike happened in the last two weeks, they realized he needed to get back out there and renew the messaging, which is why they started doing this last week. They didn’t do it every day last week, but most days and then said they’d do it every day this week.
My assumption is once we get past July 4, he might go back to not doing it everyday. They haven’t given us any guidance as to whether or not that’s the case. If things continue to escalate, though, and the numbers don’t improve through the holiday weekend and with these latest measures he’s been taking the last couple of days, I think we’ll see him everyday and they’re going to have to do something else, not just ramp up and come out and say, “please wear a mask.” They’re going to have to take steps. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we do see him every day again next week.
But a lot of this is going to be dependent on what happens. If people wear masks, if these orders in the 19 counties to roll back the reopening a bit take hold, if the positive cases, ICU rates go down, I think he’ll be able to pull back a bit on messaging, but otherwise you can expect to hear from him often as he tries to get people to comply.