Out of Office Messages

From an October profile of Gavin Newsom in The New Yorker:

Newsom gazed up into the building’s marble dome. Did he get smaller, or did the problems get bigger? You enter politics to change lives, and you end up hoping just to save your own. “I always imagined what it would be like to leave this office,” he said. “I thought it would be powerful, but the minute I swore in Ed Lee as the next mayor, literally seconds later, every reporter is running toward Ed Lee, every staffer is running toward him, and I remember walking down these stairs alone. Ed never called me, my staff didn’t call me—nobody. All that energy, over in a nanosecond.” He shivered, draped his jacket over his shoulder, and loped downstairs to the S.U.V. waiting to speed him on his way to being the future ex-governor of California. 

Tuesday’s election say 7 members of Executive Council lose their seats: Paula Biggar, Jordan Brown, Richard Brown, Tina Mundy, Pat Murphy, Chris Palmer and Wade MacLauchlan, and I expect they’re all going through variations of what Newsom experienced.

These are people who, under Tuesday, were called “Minister” by their employees and were responsible for significant budgets and policies. Today they are civilians, responsible for getting their summer tires put on.

While I’m sure they’ll all do okay in life, it wouldn’t hurt to drop them a line today to thank them for their service, especially if their service touched you, your family, or your community in a particularly significant way.