Gavin Newsom, standing waist-deep in a Montana river with a fly rod in his hand, told CNN's Jake Tapper that closing California's beaches during the pandemic was "insane, in hindsight." He also called his infamous 2020 French Laundry dinner — the maskless, indoor, multi-course affair that happened while his own state's restaurants were shuttered — "boneheaded."

The governor who issued the nation's first statewide stay-at-home order on March 19, 2020, is now conceding that the order's consequences were, in his word, insane. From a fishing vacation.

Newsom temporarily closed Orange County beaches. He oversaw a state where parks, playgrounds, and skate parks were sealed off — some literally filled with sand to prevent use. Los Angeles County imposed its own beach closure on top of the state restrictions. A paddleboarder was arrested for being alone in the ocean. And through all of it, Newsom defended every measure as necessary.

Now he says "L.A. refused" to reopen schools on a reasonable timeline, drawing a line between his administration and the district-union negotiations that kept kids locked out of classrooms long after other states had reopened. The major school districts, he acknowledged, waited too long.

Convenient framing from a man who spent years defending the same apparatus that produced those delays. State health rules, county conditions, and union demands all flowed downstream from the emergency powers Newsom wielded. Blaming L.A. for the consequences of a statewide posture he set is like blaming the flood damage on the river instead of the dam.

Tapper, for his part, offered that "a lot of people made mistakes" — the kind of soft-focus absolution that a CNN host extends to a fishing buddy but never to a Republican governor. Nobody's producing a fly-fishing segment with Ron DeSantis where Jake nods sympathetically about pandemic trade-offs.

Newsom is widely considered a prospective 2028 Democratic presidential contender, which makes the timing of this confession less confession and more renovation. He told Tapper he wouldn't enter the primary if former Vice President Kamala Harris runs, arguing their overlapping supporters would make the contest "destructive." So the admission tour has a ceiling — and a calendar.

California's lockdown record is Newsom's clearest national political vulnerability, and he knows it. The state that arrested people for surfing alone, shut down outdoor dining while indoor film production continued, and kept public school children home while the governor's own kids attended private school in person — that state's record doesn't poll-test well outside Sacramento.

He said "insane." He said it on CNN, not Fox. He said it in waders, not behind a podium. Four years and one presidential ambition later, the word finally arrived — carried downstream on a current that millions of Californians felt long before their governor bothered to wade in.