Bucky Linked List · Bucky Linked List

For years, Newsom has cultivated the air of an accidental politician. He notes that, in his twenties, he was a wine entrepreneur: with support from the dynastic businessman and composer Gordon Getty, he launched a wine shop, then a café, and then a vineyard and other projects, called PlumpJack (a Falstaff epithet, in “Henry IV, Part 1”). Today, he owns, partly in a blind trust designed to avoid conflicts of interest, stakes in offshoot enterprises with names like the Falstaff Management Group, Inc. He tells people that, if his political career ended tomorrow, he would return to life in business, and what a mercy that would be. But the feint convinces almost no one, because Newsom is perhaps the least Falstaffian man in wine. He starts texting at seven in the morning. He dresses each day as if for the meeting that will change his life. His holdings earn him, passively, more than a million dollars a year, enough to live on and more, and yet there he is, week after week, taking notes in policy binders, standing in the sun along the border—a guy so all in for the public grind, it seems, that he has turned even the simple pleasures in life, like poking fun at the President’s unhinged posts, into a statehouse chore.