Just when it seems he’s making it all up on the fly, he mentions a nascent platform he’s been sketching out, which he dubbed Project 2029 after the MAGA blueprint Project 2025. “I’ve quite literally written out, like, eight pages of commonsense good policy ideas that are long overdue, that would be a framework of a 2029 plan,” he tells me.
Later, in the same conversation, the page count grows: “I have, I kid you not, 36 pages of ideas.” He has notebooks of ideas in his car, he says, and invites me to see them. So we get into an elevator and head down to the subbasement of the hotel, arriving at a delivery entrance pungent with garbage smells and a team of stone-faced Secret Service agents hovering around the governor’s black SUV. He opens the back door and rifles through a leather duffel bag, pulling out a pile of notepads and loose-leaf paper filled with handwritten scrawl. He flips through, reading off bits and pieces, until he gets to a page marked “PROJECT 2029: Ideas for Democrats.”
“No one touches these,” he says. “These are my own little version. This is just policy, not narrative, the kinds of things we need to do: zoning reform, corporate tax, junk-fee stuff, new domestic strategies and tariffs, preschool things, a cap on childcare, family leave, paid sick leave, child tax credits, industrial decarbonization, anti-monopoly stuff, immigration, whistleblower protections.”
I ask if this stuff is for January 6, 2029, the day a new president is certified by Congress. He smiles coyly. I note that Bobby Kennedy also toured the South in 1968 during his own run for the presidency. At this, Newsom brightens, mentioning a framed photograph at home, a black-and-white image of Kennedy kneeling in front of a young boy next to an old beat-up car. Newsom says he looks at the image while he brushes his teeth every morning. He gets down on one knee to imitate the Bobby Kennedy pose in the garage of the InterContinental.
“Yeah, that’s the why,” he muses. “Let’s stand up for ideals.”
Newsom loves the performance. The Rocky Balboa of it all, the Bill Clinton of it all, the Bobby Kennedy of it all.
He will undoubtedly draw punches from both ends of the political divide, both saying essentially the same thing: slick, shallow, failed, corrupt, cynical, visionless. And, of course, Californian. Can Newsom survive the debate this country wants to have?
“I don’t have a problem fighting,” Newsom tells me. “Nor do I have a problem getting roughed up and getting back up. I’ve been road tested. It’s not small ball out here in California.”
His chin is out and ready.
