Newsom looking scared during the fire season: Thomas Elias

At times during this fall’s still simmering fire season, rookie Gov. Gavin Newsom looked a little like a scared rabbit as he ping-ponged for weeks from blaze to blaze, from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa and many points in between.
Newsom has good political reason to be frightened. He lived through the energy crunch in the first years of this millennium and knows how that debacle destroyed the popularity of then-Gov. Gray Davis, even though Davis had no say about the electricity deregulation be