A Newsom critic and a rising Democratic star

Matt Mahan didn’t set out to be a scold and pain in Gavin Newsom’s backside.

- Voices MARK Z. BARABAK COLUMNIST

SAN JOSE Mayor Matt Mahan doesn't shy from calling out fellow Democrats.

(RICH PEDRONCELLI Associated Press)

He doesn’t mean to sound like a wrathful Republican when he criticizes one-party rule in Sacramento. Or a disgruntled independent when he assails a Democratic establishment that’s become, as he sees it, “a club of insiders who take care of each other” and mostly go along to get along.

Maybe because that’s “my diagnosis of it,” said the 42-year-old San José mayor, “I have tried very consciously to not fall into that trap of just wanting to be liked.”

He is, Mahan insists, a Democrat to his core, his roots sunk deep in the loamy soil of working-class Watsonville, where, over the mountains and light-years from Silicon Valley, he grew up the son of a mail carrier and a high school teacher.

That makes his candor all the more bracing, and refreshing, at a time when Democrats are struggling nationally to regain their footing and find a meaningful way forward.

“We have become so caught up in our own rhetoric of helping the little guy that we've stopped actually checking to make sure that we are doing that,” Mahan said over lunch at a cantina downtown.

Results, he said, are what matter. Not good intentions.

And certainly not the performative pugilism that some, including the hyper-online Newsom, pass off as leadership. “A sugar high,” Mahan called it.

“I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated and feel powerless, and so that rhetoric has this cathartic effect,” he said. “But I don’t know that it actually, over time, moves us toward success, and I mean not just success in society, but even political success, because ultimately, if you’re not offering solutions, I think you can have a hard time getting to a majority position.”

Mahan comes by his outsider status naturally.