Newsom's 'original sin' becomes Trump's fault, according to a chart blaming Biden.

…(cont) On September 12th, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Governor Newsom sat for an interview and was asked about his state's housing and homelessness situation, which by every account is bad. He didn't duck it. He called it California's "original sin." His phrase. He talked about decades of restrictive development policy, said the state had spent years not building enough of what people needed, said the criticism was fair. That's an answer. Whose fault — his state's, over decades, by his own account.

Four days after that, on the 16th, the governor put out a chart. It was meant to show what housing costs are doing lately, and what it showed was a steep climb — and he said, in effect, that the climb belonged to President Trump.

Only the chart itself doesn't agree with him. The increase it draws happens earlier than that, on the calendar it happens under the prior administration, the one before this one. It's his chart. He's the one who put it up.

So in four days I've got two different answers to the identical question, and I don't like that, and I'll tell you why with something from around my own house, because it's the only comparison I've got.

I've got a garage I don't park in anymore. There's a mower in there, and a bag from the corner store that's been sitting on the same step since April, and if the garage floods every time it rains — and it does — I don't get to blame a different thing each week. Tuesday it's the mower's fault, Friday it's the bag's fault. It's the same garage, the same roof, the same me standing in the doorway looking at it. The answer to "why does my garage flood" doesn't change shape depending on what day you ask me, because nothing about the garage changed in between.

I'm not saying the governor's situation is my garage. I'm saying I only know of one honest way a question keeps the same answer twice, and that's if nothing underneath it actually moved.

Did the governor call his own state's housing crisis its "original sin," decades in the making, on September 12th? Did the chart he then circulated on the 16th show that same crisis accelerating under an administration that isn't the current one?

Excuse me — before I let this go, one more thing, because I keep almost forgetting it and then remembering. The chart he circulated says the fault belongs to one administration. The words from the 12th already gave a different account — decades, plural, home-grown, nobody else's. So when the governor points at the chart, which of his own answers is he standing behind — the one from the chart, or the one he gave four days earlier, in his own words?