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If you’re reading a Gavin Newsom memoir for pleasure, you should be first in line for an emergency MRI. His second book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, is out this week and simply cannot be read for enjoyment. It’s like Hillbilly Elegy but for middle-class alcoholics in the Bay Area with close ties to petroleum magnates. It is an exhausting hagiography of yet another man who had an affair while in office. It is not so much a book as it is several hundred pages to endure.

The only way to read it, then, is as a shot across the bow for the Democratic primary. 2028 will be a big year for California: Los Angeles is hosting the Summer Olympics, and the state’s governor will perhaps make a play for shifting the federal government from demonstrably fascist to sleepily centrist. Newsom hasn’t formally announced any intention to run for president just yet, but between trolling Donald Trump and this new memoir that frames him as a Humble Public Servant, you should expect to see a lot of him in the next two years. And don’t you worry, you can tell he’s going to work very hard, because his sleeves are rolled up on the sepia-toned cover!

Look, I don’t want to talk about Newsom. Almost no one does! Barely even Trump, who’s been publicly mocking “Newscum,” as he calls him, for years. But as the Democratic Party continues to do absolutely nothing revolutionary to win any voters back, Newsom has emerged as one of the more likely candidates for the next election (if we have one, ha ha ha ha ha). Whether any of us want him or not, he’s currently the most prominent candidate openly vying for the Democratic nomination. It’s not like they’ve had any better ideas: Kamala Harris, despite having lost this popularity contest already, is gently threatening to run again in 2028. But in Young Man in a Hurry, you can see Newsom doing his best Joe Biden impression, still following in the same footsteps of the kind of politician that voters just don’t want anymore. He’s obeying an old playbook, a pre-COVID, pre-Oct. 7, pre–ICE raids United States, where being a friendly and folksy version of neoliberalism was just enough to win.

The book is political-memoir bingo, mostly about his youth, his parents, and his childhood dyslexia, which made reading and speaking a challenge for him (an easy proxy for Biden’s stuttering). His single mother is a saint who raised him and his sister despite financial and emotional hardships. He describes his father, William Newson III, as........

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