The 960 Governor

The Perils of Governing by Applause

When Gavin Newsom recently told a predominantly black audience in Atlanta that he was “a 960 SAT guy,” he meant to charm. “I’m like you,” he said. The line backfired, of course. The intent was humility. The effect was closer to a stereotype. It embodied the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that has come to define the Democratic Party over the years.

Newsom’s bigotry aside, his intent was clear: I struggled. I’m relatable. I’m not a spreadsheet with cufflinks. I’m human.

In retail politics, that’s gold. As an executive, it’s a tell.

Let’s be precise. In the mid-1980s, when Newsom took the SAT, the national average was just above 1000. A 960 wasn’t catastrophic. It wasn’t bottom-tier. By simple distribution math, it falls slightly below average. Translated to an IQ score, it sits comfortably in the mid-90s.

That fact, by itself, means very little. Standardized tests are imperfect. Many bright people score poorly. Many unremarkable intellects, like mine, master the mechanics of standardized tests. But when a governor voluntarily spotlights his less-than-average score as part of his public brand, he invites scrutiny of what that signal implies.

Because California is not a slightly-below-average problem. California is a trillion-dollar puzzle box.

Housing policy is a dense web of zoning, CEQA constraints, municipal fragmentation, incentive distortions, and interlocking political veto points. Homelessness is an overlapping Venn diagram of addiction policy, mental health infrastructure, public safety doctrine, and land-use paralysis. Wildfire management involves climate modeling, forestry science, insurance markets, and regulatory reform.

These are not vibes problems. They are systems problems.

And systems problems reward a very specific cognitive profile: high tolerance for abstraction, long-chain causal reasoning, comfort with nonlinear feedback loops, and the ability to hold multiple interacting variables in working memory without dropping any. These are capabilities I am not particularly good at. Neither is Newsom.

Social intelligence, which Newsom clearly possesses in abundance, is a distinct skill set. It’s eye contact and tone modulation. It’s coalition-building and narrative framing. It’s reading a room and adjusting the pitch.

That’s extraordinarily useful for becoming governor. It is far less useful for unwinding a 40-year accumulation of regulatory nightmares or, I don’t know, angling for a promotion with global consequences.

California, under Gavin Newsom, is not a state suffering from a lack of empathy. It’s a state suffering from insufficient correction. Policies are layered atop one another. Funding is poured into programs with little oversight. Budgets grow. So do the homeless encampments. Announcements outpace outcomes. The machinery clanks along. But the problems persist.

This is not an argument that intelligence alone guarantees effective governance. History is littered with brilliant men who engineered catastrophe. IQ is not wisdom. It is not discipline. It is not courage.

But when the math gets hard, charm does not carry the decimal.

Running the fifth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom brags each day, is not the same as running a wine business or a city council. It requires relentless analysis and modeling of second- and third-order consequences. It requires comfort with unpopular structural surgery. It requires someone who sees not just the headline but the architecture beneath the social ill.

Newsom’s strength has always been social intelligence. He reads rooms well and navigates media ecosystems with agility.

California’s problems, however, do not appear to be impressed.

Housing remains punishingly expensive. Homeless encampments continue to sprawl despite historic spending. Insurance companies are fleeing wildfire zones. Energy costs are outrageous. Residents, rich and poor, are not migrating east in silence.

California does not need more narrative. The state is not short on charm. Like the nation, it is short on fundamental, structural correction. And while being “one of us” makes for terrific applause lines, governing at this scale requires something else entirely.

There is nothing wrong with being ordinary. There is something wrong with mistaking ordinary for sufficient. California’s challenges are extraordinary, but its leadership style is not.