Newsom lectures Obama on political timing!

After all the melodrama Gavin Newsom has put San Francisco through over the past several years---his affair with his chief of staff's wife, the drinking problem, the aborted campaign for governor---you would think he would keep a lower profile and just do the job city voters elected him to do. Instead, in a remarkable bit of chutzpah, he's lecturing President Obama about how he should proceed on gay marriage and gay rights:

Newsom, displeased with Obama's seeming ambivalence toward same-sex marriage and ending the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, said the president should have taken a page from the mayor's own playbook and tackled the issue early in his term. "You're better off doing it in the beginning and moving on," the mayor said. "I'm not trying to pile on; I'm just trying to express some of that frustration and anxiety that exists, not just in Massachusetts but in the progressive community itself."

Hard to believe that Newsom still doesn't understand that his gay marriage initiative in February, 2004, was one of the things that torpedoed John Kerry's presidential campaign and helped President Bush win a second term. 

Newsom's poorly-timed gay marriage initiative was launched in February, and by election day in 2004 there were successful anti-gay marriage initiatives in eleven states. These initiatives helped conservatives get their people to the polls to vote against gay marriage and, while they were at it, John Kerry.

Why didn't Newsom simply wait until after the election in 2004? Because he's personally and politically a narcissist. He was---still is, evidently---too immature politically to consider how important timing was on that volatile issue in an election year.