Remember Katie Couric? The longtime morning anchor with the cheeky grin raised eyebrows this week in her podcast when she asked Gov. Newsom if he had a problem with being "ridiculously good-looking."
How is one supposed to answer a question like that?
For his part, Newsom acknowledged her evaluation of his sterling good looks and took the query seriously. Specifically, the exchange went like this:
Couric: "Are you just ridiculously good-looking as Vogue said? No, seriously. What do you do about that?"
Newsom: "You don’t do anything about it. Because if you’re going to do something about it, then you’re you’re [BS]-ing people. You know what? I am who I am. And I’m — It’s fine. You don’t have to like me. Or maybe you like a slick person. I don’t know. Whatever. It’s okay."
In the Vogue profile she's referencing, the writer described Newsom as “embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address.”
“I am embarrassed on behalf of all journalists,” National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty wrote in an article about Couric's interview. Megyn Kelly wondered on X if she would've asked JD Vance the same thing.
Others pointed out that Couric did eventually get to meatier subjects, including poverty in California. As Yahoo News reported, she noted, "The highest poverty rate tied with Louisiana, the highest unemployment, and as Nick Kristof of the New York Times recently wrote, Mississippi schools outperform California schools, especially for poor kids. Now people see that or hear that or read that and they’re like, ‘No thanks, California. No thanks, Gavin Newsom. We’re good,'” Couric said, referencing the number of people leaving the state.
Newsom had answers for that, too.
“Our poverty rate’s about average," he said. "And we’re right up there with Florida, Louisiana, and others with the supplemental poverty rate, which has been the case for 40 years,” he said. “And the original sin there is housing, which has been a problem in California since Ronald Reagan left office as governor. And we simply have a supply-demand imbalance.”