Is Newsom’s putative campaign in a bumbling phase?

As California Gov. Gavin Newsom pursues the early phases of what looks like a 2028 presidential campaign, he’s running afoul of two realities about his present office:

One is that no California governor can hide for long from any issue affecting the state. It’s too big for that and governors – unlike U.S. senators – don’t get to pick and choose which issues they want to deal with. Everything eventually lands on the governor’s plate, from welfare to water, from budgets to the survival of bees.

The other unchanging reality is that Eastern pundits love analyzing the performance of California governors, since the sheer size of this state automatically propels whoever is governor into the status of a presidential possibility. So even though Newsom is mostly staying home, he gets as much natio