ZadekpediaGavin Newsom is discussed across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the governor of California and as a recurring subject of the program’s arguments about federalism, state spending, and executive power. The episodes identify him as recently elected governor at the time of his State of the State address Not Enough Bricks (2019) and treat his policies — on rail, health care, housing, and pandemic restrictions — as evidence in broader debates rather than as topics in their own right.
High-speed rail and the State of the State
Charlie Dice framed a discussion of the Green New Deal around Newsom’s State of the State address, describing him as the recently elected governor of California who said he was not positioning himself for a run in 2020. Mark Joffe said Newsom was stuck with an unsustainable plan inherited from two predecessors, approved under Governor Schwarzenegger and heavily pushed by Governor Brown. Joffe said Newsom indefinitely postponed the two most costly aspects of the train — a connection from Bakersfield underneath a mountain range to the Los Angeles Basin, and a connection from San Jose to the Central Valley tunneling under a mountain range — while a 165-mile segment connecting Bakersfield to Merced in the Central Valley is built. Joffe noted that many people, including President Trump, marked this as a cancellation, but that it was not, and that the postponements stood to save Californians in the range of $50 to $100 billion. The same episode cites a study by two UC Berkeley researchers finding that construction would generate 9.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and that offsetting it would take 71 years under a medium-occupancy assumption Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Newsom’s phrase about “California values,” set against the President’s vision of America, drew Dice’s attention in the same episode. Dice called the phrase ambiguous and treated California as a federalist experiment trying out some objectives of the Green New Deal on a smaller scale Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Health care and single-payer
Sally Pipes described Newsom as having run on single-payer and having had the support of a militant nurses’ union, but as pursuing stepping-stone approaches once elected. She listed three: California starting in January would have an individual mandate, after the federal mandate was removed from Obamacare; subsidies on Covered California would rise to 600% of the federal poverty level, so that a family of four earning up to $150,000 could be eligible; and he increased the age at which illegal immigrants could get Medi-Cal coverage from 19 up to 26, which she said he claimed would cost $98 million and cover 90,000 undocumented immigrants. Pipes said she believed it would cost more and that young undocumented immigrants in other states would flock to California for the coverage. She attributed the caution to affordability, saying Newsom still supports single-payer but realizes he has to do it slowly because the taxpayers of California cannot afford a $400 billion healthcare bill. In the same discussion she recalled that California’s Senate passed a single-payer bill, costed by the Senate Appropriations Committee at $400 billion a year against a state budget of about $190 billion, and that Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon declined to bring it to a vote Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Housing, rent control and price signals
In an episode on rent control, Charlie Deist said that to his credit he saw that Newsom had said California needs more housing construction, and that this may be part of his policy platform, while arguing that rent control hurts the people it aims to help The Rent Control Bomb (2019). Bob Zadek’s adjacent argument was that there is no such thing as price gouging, using the example of entrepreneurs selling bottled water at several times the usual price after Hurricane Sandy, and that government cannot decide the price of anything.
”Nation-state” and the pandemic
Bob Zadek described Newsom as having had a public dispute over President Trump’s and the federal government’s handling of coronavirus control and shelter-in-place, complaining he was not getting his share of supplies and announcing that California would exercise its power as a “nation-state,” acquiring its own ventilators and testing kits and using its buying power to economically separate itself from Washington. Zadek compared the speech to a mini Fort Sumter attack. Frank Buckley said coupling “nation” with “state” suggests a degree of independence, and that Newsom’s talk of California going its own way in its coronavirus response was benign and consistent with the Trump administration’s approach of letting states compete. Buckley traced the idea of divided sovereignty to the document that came out of Philadelphia in 1787, noted that Alexander Hamilton had echoed the view that there could be only one sovereign, and said state sovereignty fell into ill repute because of the way it was used by racists in Southern states Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020).
Recall and emergency powers
A March 2021 episode features Bob Zadek interviewing California State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley about the movement to recall Newsom. The excerpt summary lists Newsom’s use of emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of school and business closures, AB 5, and allegations of corruption in state contracting among the topics, along with the non-delegation doctrine The Case for Recalling Gavin Newsom (2021).
In a separate episode, Carol Roth used Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill as a case study: the business spent around $80,000 to comply with outdoor dining standards, then the city it fell under the purview of Los Angeles shut outdoor dining down, while a movie production nearby was allowed to set up a catering tent in the same parking lot. Roth said it was then found that Newsom had had dinner at the French Laundry, breaking his own mandates, and that one of those in attendance was a lobbyist for the movie industry. She said she had run a bracket tournament on Twitter to find the worst governor in America for small business and that Newsom took the title Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021).
Across episodes
The rail episode, the health-care episode and the rent-control episode all treat Newsom as a politician who states goals and then acts incrementally — postponing rail segments rather than canceling, pursuing stepping stones rather than single-payer, acknowledging a need for housing construction. The 2020 and 2021 episodes reverse the emphasis: there Newsom is the actor whose emergency measures and public gestures are characterized as overreach or favoritism. Frank Buckley’s federalism framing and Kevin Kiley’s recall campaign are the two poles, and the episodes show no reconciliation between them.