World Beats a Path to S.F. Mayor Newsom’s Door

SAN FRANCISCO —  Gavin Newsom’s 63rd day in office began on a recent morning at sunup and ended at 10 p.m. in a room full of wilting staffers and stale candy bars. In between was the dizzying schedule of a hands-on new mayor determined to set a fresh tone for this city on everything from education to crime to economic development.

If it weren’t for a “60 Minutes” TV segment featuring Newsom -- he was too busy to watch it -- and a private meeting with a Democratic Party kingmaker from Washington, it would have been difficult to tell that the neophyte mayor had planted himself at the center of an international news story.

But laud him or loathe him, most observers agree that Newsom’s decision to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples will secure his place in political history.

He was featured on the front page of France’s Le Monde as a civil rights hero. The conservative British press has lambasted him. In this country, his name and earnest Irish-Catholic face are household fare, beamed into living rooms on “Larry King Live” and “Nightline.”

By the time the California Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a halt to the gay marriages -- at least for now -- Newsom’s move had reverberated through the country like a political stadium wave. Officials in Oregon, New Mexico and New York followed his lead, while conservatives in a growing number of states and the nation’s capital stepped up plans for constitutional amendments that would ban the same-sex unions.

Against this backdrop, one would expect the mayor to be just a bit distracted. He’s not.

The action by the state high court triggered meetings with legal advisors and landed Newsom before news cameras to deliver a message of defiance. He vowed to press forward with the city’s legal challenge to state marriage law as unconstitutional. The frenzy continued into Friday, when Newsom rose before 3:30 a.m. for an appearance on a national TV news show.

But for the most part, the 36-year-old mayor has stubbornly refused to be overtaken by the events he set in motion.

In the four weeks since Newsom ordered his county clerk to make marriage licenses gender-neutral, more than 4,100 couples became “spouses for life” on the rotunda stairs below his City Hall office. But behind the imposing wooden doors of Room 200, it is mostly mundane city business that occupies Newsom. But he is determined that it not be business as usual.

As pundits ponder the political implications of Newsom’s same-sex marriage move, he is hiring and firing, and paying surprise visits to housing projects, schools and even murder scenes.

He recently carved nearly $1 million out of his own budget, unusual for a mayor at midyear. His staff must now pay for parking, and Newsom slashed his own salary -- something that critics say won’t be too painful for the wealthy entrepreneur.

He is requiring ethics training for newly appointed commissioners -- a first for the city, and has named a special monitor to root out corruption and favoritism in the Department of Building Inspection.

In between are the conferences, fundraisers, flag-raisings and chamber lunches that pepper any public official’s day.

Newsom squeezed to victory in a tight election last December, but polls show his popularity has soared in the city since he ordered the same-sex marriage licenses. Still, not a single event on his public schedule in the past month has dealt with that subject.

“The days are a little longer, but nine or 10 hours have been spent on other issues,” says Newsom, rattling off problems such as the city’s record budget deficit, homelessness and a lack of affordable housing for working families. “I’m trying to quickly demonstrate renewed energy and focus and getting back to basics. We’re not delaying reforms.”

Bent on changing the bureaucratic culture of the city’s five dozen departments, Newsom is unabashedly micromanaging. A thick file on his desk lists tens of thousands of city employees and their overtime pay. Newsom pored over them to identify 215 recently identified pink slip targets. After narrowing the list, he demanded brief biographies to help in the final cut.

Meanwhile, every meeting serves as an audition of sorts. After a session to discuss homeless issues this week, Newsom made a note to himself: Fire two of the attendees.

“They didn’t care what others had to say, only what they had to say,” Newsom recalled with the kind of candor that surprises even his closest aides. “I’m looking for people who are there to listen and learn.”

If altering the bureaucratic culture of a major city in the midst of a global media circus weren’t challenging enough, there’s the personal chaos.

Newsom and his wife, former prosecutor Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, recently sold their six-bedroom Pacific Heights home. Then she accepted a job as a Court TV anchor. Along with a gig as a CNN legal commentator, she now spends most of her time in New York, leaving Newsom alone in a temporary corporate apartment.

But the temporary place is furnished, Newsom offers, and besides, he’s never home.

Last Wednesday is a case in point. Newsom began the day at a breakfast with friends, then dashed off to address 1,500 high school girls convened for at a health conference.

He notes with delight that he was the only man in the room, then rattles off a series of high-profile appointments he has made since taking office: police chief, fire chief, chief medical examiner. All women. The audience roars.

Newsom then climbs into a city-issued Lincoln Town Car with a bodyguard and -- blue and orange lights flashing -- heads for Jefferson Elementary School. The visit is less confrontational than some others Newsom has paid around town. Jefferson Principal Judi Rosen had been alerted the night before; many of Newsom’s other visits were unannounced and involved programs under his direct purview.

At an outing with homeless outreach workers, he had pointed to men he had seen on the streets for years and demanded to know what was being done for them.

At the school, Newsom ditches his jacket in the car. Two hours later he is still there, cutting a paper square with the help of a fifth-grade girl for a math exercise. He quizzes second-graders on the birds they expect to encounter on a field trip, and peruses a roomful of inventions He asks teachers for specifics on how the city can be most helpful to them.

And he graciously accepts a bag of greasy doughnut holes from second-grader Natalie Morace, who without knowing the mayor would visit, had chosen Newsom as the subject of her hero essay. In a tiny voice, the girl compliments his “courage” for allowing gay people to marry, because “when you love someone, you cannot help it.”

Later Newsom high-tails it to Bayview Hunter’s Point, an area plagued by unsolved murders. He had paid a surprise visit to a housing project there once before and was appalled. A burned-out dumpster blocked part of an intersection, where it had sat for years. The street was full of potholes. The backboards at the basketball courts were scarred by bullet holes.

Newsom ordered it cleaned up. By the time he arrives on this afternoon -- to announce rewards for information on several unsolved murders -- crews have patched potholes and repaired sidewalks. The courts have been resurfaced with private donations. Media people encircle Newsom and his police chief as he announces the rewards. He talks up improvements to the witness protection program and a new crime mapping system.

But winning trust here will not be easy. Annette Martin, 40, complains that she’s seen it all before. Unless Newsom helps bring jobs to residents, she says, they’ll keep dealing drugs and committing crimes.

The mayor listens but ultimately draws a line. “Well, you’ve got to do your part, too,” he tells her. “We can’t just do it all for you.”

After reviewing the progress of construction, he returns to City Hall for a series of private meetings: a Westside community leader, a Habitat for Humanity official, a city job prospect.

By evening, Newsom is breezing through an affordable housing conference and delivering a pep talk at an election fundraiser for a school board member he had appointed.

The day ends with a routine staff meeting -- which runs late into the night. No one thought to bring food, so they make do with candy bars and cookies.

Squeezed into his schedule earlier, however, was a telling visit from Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network. The organization has cultivated and supported dozens of Clinton-style Democrats running for Congress as well as positions in local and state government.

Newsom has been on Rosenberg’s radar since last fall, when the group endorsed him and he served as keynote speaker for their conference. Some say Newsom’s move on gay marriages -- while popular in San Francisco -- was too controversial for a national audience, particularly in an election year.

But Rosenberg begs to differ.

“It’s amazing how many people have said to me, ‘Isn’t that the guy you told us to help? We didn’t know anything about him then, but he’s an amazing guy,’ ” Rosenberg said. “I think people really have very big expectations for him in the long term. He is arguably the single most-promising Democrat under 40 in the country.”

Rosenberg stopped by to see how the mayor was handling his newfound fame, and to remind him that he’s got some heavyweight backing.

“I told him my commitment to help him is no less than it was before,” Rosenberg said. “We really want to help him become a true national leader for the party. Whatever ‘it’ is, I think Gavin’s got it.”