Gov. Gavin Newsom’s State of the State speech underscores warring impulses that, if he runs, will become difficult to explain in a polarized presidential campaign.

One of the strangest, most dissonant lines in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s final State of the State speech on Thursday came near the end. 

“To those with California Derangement Syndrome, I’ll repeat — it’s time to update your talking points,” Newsom said in an address to state lawmakers at the Capitol in Sacramento. “California remains the most blessed and often the most cursed place on Earth.”  

After all, how can a place with so much natural beauty also be the site of so many horrific natural disasters, such as the Palisades and Eaton wildfires that devastated Los Angeles County a year ago?

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What Newsom didn’t seem to recognize was that California’s contradictions are often what rankle the state’s critics. How, they ask, can a place with so many natural advantages also be the epicenter of our nation’s homelessness, mental illness and drug crises? How can the world’s fourth-largest economy also be the state with the nation’s highest poverty rate when the cost of living is taken into account? How are we reaping the financial benefits of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies and simultaneously facing estimated annual budget deficits of $35 billion starting in fiscal year 2027-28?

For many critics, the answer to these questions is mismanagement by Newsom and the state’s supermajority-Democratic Legislature. 

If Newsom intended his last State of the State to be a corrective to this perspective — to cement his legacy as governor and to serve as an opening salvo in his likely 2028 presidential campaign — he did not succeed. 

Why? Because his speech was rife with its own contradictions. It also underscored warring impulses within Newsom that will become increasingly difficult to explain in the polarized, high-pressure environment of a presidential campaign. 

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Perhaps the most glaring inconsistency came during Newsom’s comments on wealth inequality. 

“Plutarch was right when he warned us 2,000 years ago that this imbalance of the rich and the poor ‘is the oldest and most fatal ailment of........

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