CA = NYC?

Whenever Gov. Jerry Brown leaves office, a top favorite to follow him is Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. In New York City for the inauguration of the city’s new liberal Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, Newsom backed the mayor’s program for a lot more government. Reported the New York Times:

“The mayor has a remarkable opportunity to make real many progressive policies and prove their merit,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, who as mayor of San Francisco introduced a form of universal health care and allowed same-sex couples to wed.

“De Blasio matters,” Mr. Newsom said. “A lot of us are counting on his success.”…

His administration could be a redemptive moment for a national left whose policies were often blamed for the crumbling of urban centers in the 1960s and 1970s, yet has now started to reassert itself in smaller jurisdictions with bold new approaches on issues like income equality and poverty….

The stakes are high for Mr. de Blasio, who entered politics as an aide to former Mayor David N. Dinkins and has seen firsthand the consequences of a failed left-leaning administration.

The waves of crime and racial tensions that plagued Mr. Dinkins’s tenure nudged Democrats into the city’s political wilderness for two decades, as the lengthy tenures of Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg ushered in an era of hard-nosed, business-minded executives in City Hall.

Assuming Newsom ends up running for governor in 2018, by then the evidence will be in on whether or not de Blasio brought Nirvana to the Big Apple and boosted the fates of Newsom and other like-minded pols. Or whether the city returned to the Dinkins era of soaring crime and fleeing businesses.