Gavin Newsom gets progressives like me all mixed up inside. He hits the right buttons — and often the wrong ones.

It’s exciting to see the tall, lean, well-groomed politician emerge from the obscurity of his lieutenant governor role and seize the spotlight again as he escalates his race for governor in 2018. Newsom has sometimes been dismissed as a hairstyle in search of a man. But this is a superficial view. I’ve always seen him as the rare politician who grapples with big ideas as well as the minutiae of public policy. In short, he has a brain, and he uses it. Isn’t that a refreshing concept these days?

Recently he’s added to his progressive credentials by championing a single-payer health care system for the state. He’s also called on California’s public universities and colleges to be declared sanctuary campuses for students without documentation, and he joined the February protest at San Francisco International Airport against President Trump’s travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. “I had to get down here,” he told reporters. “I have to look my kids in the eye and say I met this moment.”

Of course, Newsom also had his heroic moments as San Francisco mayor — none more so than the day in February 2004 when he ordered City Hall clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. I’ll always remember how literally isolated he was when he later showed up at a party hosted by Salon, the online publication I founded, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. As Newsom wandered through the party, the Democratic dignitaries in attendance seemed to flee from him. Even gay Rep. Barney Frank scorned the young mayor for taking a bold stand that Republicans were eager to use as a wedge issue in that year’s presidential election.

So there’s brave and innovative Newsom. And then there’s slick and corporate Newsom — the leader who sometimes seems more of a tech entrepreneur than a man of the people, with his talk of re-engineering democracy while taking bags full of campaign cash from Airbnb and private equity firms. Newsom has raised more money in his race for governor than any of his rivals, with a big boost from Airbnb, whose employees have kicked in more than $225,000 so far to his campaign. While progressive San Francisco officials have desperately tried to clamp reasonable limits on Airbnb, as the short-term rental behemoth threatens to turn the city into its tourist domain, Newsom has opposed all such regulatory efforts.

Who’s the real Gavin Newsom? I spoke with him recently to find out. We began by talking about the sanctuary issue.

Despite his current positioning, I reminded Newsom, he clashed with the Board of Supervisors over the city’s sanctuary policy when he was mayor. In 2008, Mayor Newsom ordered probation officers to report all undocumented youths who were arrested to immigration authorities so they could be deported. In one of the most notorious cases, a 13-year-old boy who was arrested for taking 46 cents from another youth — and then gave it back — was deported to Australia with his mother as a result of Newsom’s policy. When San Francisco supervisors passed a law that strengthened protections for undocumented youths, they later had to override a veto by Newsom.

“We have to keep recalibrating sanctuary policy,” Newsom told me. “What I did as mayor came on the heels of the Bologna tragedy,” he said, referring to the 2008 murders of Tony Bologna and two of his sons by Edwin Ramos, a Salvadoran gang member who was living in the Bay Area without legal status despite previous trouble with the law. “I went to the family funeral. It was a difficult time for me back then, politically and personally. Later, I felt our policy needed recalibration. There were legitimate legal questions about due process for minors.”

Today, Newsom said, his support for law-abiding immigrants is firm. “We know that sanctuary counties and cities are safer than non-sanctuary locations. These policies advance safety by building trust between communities and the police.”

Is Newsom overly enthralled by the tech industry, including San Francisco companies such as Uber that he has championed? He admitted that the impact of ride-service giants Uber and Lyft — whose cars now flood the city’s streets, with no apparent limits on their growing fleets — has been severe. “It takes me longer to commute from my home in Marin to downtown San Francisco than it does to drive to Sacramento,” he said. “But the answer is not to over-regulate the new ride industry. The reason Uber is so successful is that the taxi industry was not providing proper customer service. Any industry has to be appropriately regulated. But the tech genie is out of the bottle.”

Newsom prefers to talk about the “macro picture” instead of getting “consumed by situational politics.”

“The transportation industry has to be reimagined,” he airily proclaimed. But the problem is that we must live in the situational world. And here in the real world it takes two or three times as long to get from point A to point B in traffic-choked San Francisco. That is, if you can afford to live here at all.

“If I were running for mayor, I’d have more specific recommendations,” Newsom said. But this was a dodge. As I reminded him, it’s the California Public Utilities Commission — not City Hall — that’s authorized to regulate ride-hailing companies. And nobody in Sacramento seems eager to take on the Uber lobby.

I like how Newsom wrestles with the big issues — such as (speaking of Uber) the technological displacement of jobs. “That’s the issue of our time,” he said. If he’s promoted by the people of California next year, he will follow in the steps of our current visionary governor. “California is a laboratory for social progress,” Newsom said. “I’m very appreciative of how Jerry (Brown) believes in punching above his weight and pushing for innovations at the national and global level, particularly in the environmental field. If I’m elected, I’ll push for similar innovations in immigration policy, health care and government reform.”

But while he’s thinking blue-sky thoughts, I’d like to see Newsom get his hair mussed up once in awhile and join the fight against those futuristic companies that are producing dystopias in the here and now.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Talbot appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email: dtalbot@sfchronicle.com