Former President Bill Clinton called San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom an
"environmental leader" during a news conference for the President to publicly
throw his support behind the Democratic candidate for governor.
(Anant Goenka)

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom laid out a platform for his gubernatorial run Monday that centers around the creation of a new "green" economy.

Flanked by former President Bill Clinton during a news conference at Los Angeles City College, Newsom outlined plans to make California a leader in energy efficiency and to keep higher education affordable.

However, neither man addressed the elephant in the room: Democratic challenger Jerry Brown and whether Clinton's long-standing feud with California's attorney general prompted the former president to back Newsom.

The press conference ended with neither Clinton nor Newsom taking questions from reporters, who stood jam packed into a tiny corner of the room behind the mayor's supporters and LACC dignitaries.

Instead, the focus of the conference stayed on the need to re-engineer the state's energy system, a process Newsom said would grow the state's economy by generating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

"California should lead the world, not just the nation, in terms of this green economy," Newsom said, standing in LACC's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified library.

In order for buildings to meet LEED's most rigorous standards, they must be largely "energy self-sufficient," generating power from solar panels or similar devices. The Los Angeles Community College District is in the process of retrofitting a number of its older buildings to make them LEED accredited. The college also requires that all new structures meet those standards as well.

Newsom said he wants to help Californians lower their per capita energy use by retrofitting existing government buildings, constructing new ones that meet LEED standards, and providing subsides for people to put towards installing solar panels in private homes.

He said community colleges and state universities, which are charged with the responsibilities of educating workers and developing fresh concepts in environmental engineering, would be major players in building California's green economy.

Newsom pledged his support to higher education and promised to help keep tuition reasonable for students.

"It's time for the state of California to put people first and invest in people," he said.

Clinton called the mayor an "environmental leader" who "walks the walk, not just talks the talk."

Newsom's campaign received a shot in the arm last month when Clinton threw his support behind the mayor, who has been lagging behind former California governor Brown and all three Republican hopefuls in the polls.

A Rasmussin Reports poll taken Sept. 24 showed Brown leading Republican candidates Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner and former Rep. Tom Campbell by as much as 13 percent, while Newsom trailed the same candidates by as much as 6 percent.

Since former presidents rarely endorse a candidate in such a hotly contested Democratic primary for governor of California, Clinton's support of Newsom raised speculation that Clinton was trying to get back at Brown for a heated exchange that occurred during the 1992 presidential primary elections.

In their bids to secure the Democratic nomination, Clinton and Brown went head to head at a Chicago debate.

The debate turned ugly when Brown questioned the ethics of Hilary Clinton, to which her husband witheringly responded that Brown wasn't "fit to be on the same platform as my wife."

The Democratic gubernatorial primary is not till June 2010.