Hollywood Gavin Newsom is ready for his close-up.
Now that he has entered the lame duck phase of his governorship, Newsom has developed a sudden interest in improving the quality of official photographs documenting his activities.
“Unlike nearly all of his predecessors and gubernatorial counterparts, the real story here is that Governor Newsom did not have a dedicated photographer for over five years,” wrote the governor’s director of communications, Izzy Gardon, in an email to this newspaper’s editorial board. Gardon was complaining about an editorial criticizing the governor’s office for hiring photojournalist Charles Ommanney at a salary of $200,000 per year.
Not long ago, Newsom signed a declaration that the state of California is in a budget emergency. Maybe it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
Gardon wrote, “Charles plays a critical role in communicating the work of state government to the public across visual platforms — including social media — helping us meet Californians where they are at.”
They’re at the end of their rope, so I hope he brought a long lens. California has the highest poverty rate in the nation when the cost of living is taken into account, and the cost of living is higher than it should be in this state because of Newsom’s policies. His insistence that California must “show leadership” on climate change has pointlessly saddled state residents with the costs of a “transition” to 100% carbon-free electricity, something that would only be possible if it was never summer and never night. Newsom has been at war with domestic oil and gas producers, pursuing policies that have raised the cost of electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas and everything that is made or transported in the state of California.
One-third of the state’s population is on Medi-Cal, the safety-net health insurance for low-income California residents, and one of every five customers of the state’s largest investor-owned utilities are behind on paying their electric bills.
Newsom’s dedicated photographer may end up celebrated as the next Dorothea Lange, the photojournalist who captured Depression-era misery while working for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration.
But you can be assured that Newsom wasn’t interested in hiring the next Dorothea Lange. All signs point to a desire to have a personal photographer who could do for him what Alfred Wertheimer did for Elvis Presley in 1956 or what Milton H. Greene did for Marilyn Monroe between 1954 and 1957.
Charles Ommanney is the photographer who accompanied the governor on his trip to China last fall. You may remember the photo of Newsom at the Great Wall, staring into the distance like a beauty pageant contestant trying to answer a question about world peace. As reported in the Sacramento Bee and Politico at the time, Ommanney had been freelancing for Newsom on a state contract that paid him $5,000 per month for seven days and $1,500 for any additional days. His services on the China trip were covered by the California State Protocol Foundation, a nonprofit organization that accepts contributions from donors. Politico reported that Newsom himself donated more than $3 million since 2019 from his inaugural committee funds.
Donations to the inaugural committee came from entities with business before the state, as documented in the database of “behested payments.” A “behested payment” is any payment made “at the request, suggestion, or solicitation of, or made in cooperation, consultation, coordination or concert with the public official.”
In other words, it’s a shakedown. That’s legal in California.
Maybe Charles Ommanney would like to get a photo of what would be a crime scene anywhere else. A search of the database at fppc.ca.gov/transparency/behested-payments.html shows that Newsom “behested” more than $8.8 million for his inaugural festivities.
So the picture that emerges is one of a politician scratching for relevancy after the political winds unexpectedly pushed him off the national stage. Newsom used his position of power to raise vast sums of money and he has spread it around, not only to the California State Protocol Foundation but also to a federal PAC he pretentiously named “Campaign for Democracy.”
Yet with all that money available, Newsom has chosen to charge the exhausted taxpayers for the services of his political glamour photographer.
He wanted to be president. He’s going to be a coffee table book.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley
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