Gavin Newsom "Blindingly Handsome" to New Yorkers

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​Gavin Newsom never got along with the local press, especially when asked about uncomfortable topics. Actually, he seemed to prefer to get into huffy fights with them, or attempt to bite their microphones.

But the New York City press loves our ex-mayor. The New Yorker wrote a feature-length profile on him, Maureen Dowd with The New York Times wrote about his political woes last year, and the New York Times Magazine got a sit-down interview during the governor's race in 2008. More recently, Newsom met with Jada Yuan from New York Magazine for an interview published this week. He was talking less about politics and more about wine -- which he sniffed, but didn't drink.

But the reporter who was with him was definitely drinking the Newsom Kool-Aid.

    We're always intrigued to hear an outsider's view of our local pols. We wrote recently about a Harper's Bazaar interview with Kamala Harris in which the phrase "big-girl panties" was definitely dropped.

When Newsom was in the Big Apple recently to promote his Napa Valley wineries, PlumpJack and Cade, he sat down at a New York City wine bar and had a sober interview.

Here is the writer's take on Newsom.

"Gavin Newsom, 6-foot-3 and blindingly handsome, would stand out anywhere," Yuan writes. The waiter even recognized him because of his hair. Newsom reiterated that his preference for L'Oreal Clean Gel for his signature do. "The cheapest stuff out there," he told Yuan.

"I do lunches and dinners for a living," he said. "You learn to discipline and pace yourself, because you'll collapse ... what if you're at your uncle's birthday party tasting a lot of wine and you get an eleven o'clock emergency phone call?"

Wait, didn't that really happen to Newsom?

The report mostly serves up the bullet points of the rise and fall and then (sort of) rise again of Newsom's political career. But it seemed that the state's second-in-command kept the interview light -- talking mostly about wine and food. He did, however, mention something about adjusting to life as the lieutenant governor.

"In San Francisco, you're the mayor of not only a city, but a county," he says. "As lieutenant governor, you're not governor. It's a completely different thing."

What was left to say about that? So the conversation then turned back to that even less pressing topic: his hair.