Maryland voters will go to the polls next Tuesday to select their nominees for November’s gubernatorial election. All the action is on the Democratic side, as Maryland has only elected one Republican governor since Spiro Agnew. Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown is heavily favored over Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Del. Heather Mizeur. Brown is running a cautious campaign for, essentially, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s third term.
Marylanders’ tax burden ranks seventh among the states, compared to 20th place for the District and 30th for Virginia, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation. But while the Post survey found that six in 10 voters — including large majorities of blacks and whites — want the next governor to lead the state in a new direction, it also showed large majorities of Democrats backing Brown.
A recent Washington Post poll showed O’Malley with fairly impressive approval numbers (55%-39%), but lagging Hillary Clinton badly (72%-6%) in a prospective presidential run. He is also among the most polarizing governors in America. Having legalized gay marriage, raised the minimum wage, enacted stricter gun control laws, eased access to college for undocumented people, and banned the death penalty, O’Malley has the support of only 19% of Republicans, while 79% of Democrats report that they are satisfied with his performance.
Those numbers may become problematic for him if he makes the short list for vice-president, but his list of achievements will look impressive to Democratic primary voters if he gets a chance to make a case for himself. If, for whatever reason, Hillary Clinton declines to run for president, Gov. O’Malley will definitely be in the mix.
According to the Washington Post poll, Hillary Clinton was leading Barack Obama among Democratic voters by 30 points (53%-23%) as late as December 2007.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/13/AR2008011302514.html
It’s too early to worry about poll numbers on a race that hasn’t even started yet.
I predict a place for him in the Obama administration.
I don’t know, that speech he gave yesterday was pretty impressive, and members of Obama’s base responded very favorably toward it and the fact that he’s working to help his fellow Democrats who are running for office. Unlike The NeoconTM, who seems more interested in selling books. Yesterday I got the distinct feeling that the ever-elusive ‘buzz’ for a candidate attached to Governor O’Malley yesterday. Yesterday was not the first time that he received a ‘prolonged standing ovation’ for a speech at a Dem function this year. People are paying attention to this man. Especially those of us who very much want an alternative to The NeoconTM.
O’Malley’s speech was incredibly well received in Iowa this weekend. He got a prolonged standing ovation. He also is meeting with Obama organizers in Iowa this weekend.
I think he is the person the netroots should be rallying behind as he has a long record of progressive accomplishments and he talks the talk. Instead we have the netroots talking about poll numbers and saying Hillary is inevitable. It’s depressing.
More at http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/elections/2014/06/21/martin-omalley-iowa-democr
ats-convention-speech/11209343/
Three words:
President Howard Dean.
President Hillary Rodham Clinton also lost her election.
You take her seriously because you think she’s running again. But despite having a much higher profile, her success rate is no better than Dean’s.
I’ve seen what one really good speech at a state Democratic convention can do.
And I say this as a former Dean donor, town caucus whip, and state convention delegate.
We’ll see what happens.
??? Most people who run for president don’t get elected. Howard Dean is one of those. What does that prove about Martin O’Malley?
I think his point is summed up in this line, about one early “good speech”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu1JMbSLPvc
As someone who wore an orange hat and campaigned for Dean in Iowa, I can tell you that these two candidates have almost nothing in common. O’Malley has more political skills and a better resume than Dean did. O’Malley is also more inline with the base of the party. Outside of opposing Iraq, Dean was pretty conservative on issues that matter to the Dem base.
O’Malley will be a better fit for Iowa and the progressive base. He’s known for running smart campaigns in Maryland and will not have the problems Dean had with campaign spending/organization or with the media.
The progressive base and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee. That is the takeaway from the Dean campaign.
I just watched a video of the speech. He doesn’t rock the house like Obama does when he gives a speech, but it was a very good speech, with excellent content.
Do you have a link to the video? I can’t find it.
He has his own youtube channel. Here’s the video. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70euQTmzzo8
Thanks. It wasn’t a rock the house type of speech or delivery; so, wouldn’t expect a passionate reception from the audience.
A few observations. The content of the speech is good, but not as tightly and well written as what we get from Presidents and generally well-funded top POTUS candidates. It’s early in the election cycle and this factor should improve.
O’Malley speaks well. Better than Obama with his stutters. Has a nice smile. No awkward or distracting verbal, facial, or body habits or tics. Has cool and warm down. But speakers and top tier politicians also need to master moments of “hot” as well unless they’re so interesting to listen to and/or look at that they are charismatic enough with cool and warm. (In the interview with Piketty Elizabeth Warren demonstrated all three.) IMHO, O’Malley needs to add some “hot” to compensate for his pleasant but bland appearance.
He got a prolonged standing ovation at the end of the speech and he gave another speech the next day to a great response as well.
No, he’s not Barack Obama but we haven’t had anyone that good on either side of the aisle in my lifetimes. That is an unreasonable expectation. O’Malley is light years above Hillary in public speaking that is for sure.
He represents the base far better than Hillary Clinton does. Whether the base reciprocates is another story.
From the names I’ve seen, O’Malley is who I will be supporting. Not even close.
‘The base’ is a woman of color working two jobs. “The base’ isn’t people posting in prog-blog comment sections.
There’s a good chance she doesn’t have internet, except at the library. If she does, she has no time to use it, just for e-mails from a teacher, and a look-in at Tom & Lorenzo.
She wouldn’t know Martin O’Malley if she tripped over him, unless she lives in Baltimore. Mrs. Clinton she knows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States
1.) Your characterization of Internet use in the United States is wrong, even among your idealized example of a base voter. You may as well be saying that the average base voter of the Democratic Party uses an icebox and black and white television.
http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/23/a-closer-look-at-the-parties-in-2012/
2.) Your characterization of the Democratic base is even more wrong. The Democratic base is majority white despite having outsized minority support. The Democratic base is a super-majority of homeowners. Middle classers are split evenly between the parties.
http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/index1.html
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Continues-Steal-Share-of-US-Adults-Daily-Time-Spent-with-Med
ia/1010782
3.) You say that ‘”The base’ isn’t people posting in prog-blog comment sections.’ — Well, there’s the obvious and hilarious counterexample of Obama 2008 primary and general election victories, whom is now the gold standard of netroot candidates. Even in that year, the Democratic Party got the majority of their support from under 45+ year olds.
What’s more:
Finally:
4.) I… I don’t even know what to say to that last sentence. Raising recognition of candidates is what the U.S. media is good at. How many people at the beginning of 2012 even recognized the name of Bachmann, Perry, Pawlenty, Santorum (heh heh), or Cain?
Give me a break, Davis. I supported Gravel because I’m a left libertarian, and aside from his squishy nature on abortion id also be happy to support Dennis K. But I’m not glib enough to think they represent the “base.” Obama represents “the base” even if I don’t like that fact.
But let’s not play stupid. O’Malley represents these voters and Obamas coalition far more than Clinton.
If he represents them better, and has a poorer chance of winning a general election, how much better does his representation have to be, how much poorer does his chances at a general election win have to be, before it’s an unacceptable trade-off?
OT: The Victimology of Hillary Clinton
Even though her 2008 campaign took advantage of racially charged attacks on Barack Obama, she still think she’s the one who had it tough.
David Frum
Jun 20 2014, 12:36 PM ET
……………..
The better Obama did in the Democratic race overall, the more strongly white Democrats rallied to Clinton, sometimes by margins greater than 60 percent.
Almost to the very end of the race, Clinton looked to racial politics to swing the 800-plus Democratic superdelegates to her. On April 30, the week before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, she gave an interview to Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. He asked about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial “God damn America” remarks had just erupted into the news. Clinton said, “I’m going to leave it up to voters … but I wouldn’t have stayed in that church. I take offense at it. I think it’s offensive and outrageous, and I’m going to express my opinion. Others can express theirs.” (Clinton went on to win more than 60 percent of white Democrats in Indiana.)
In their detailed campaign book Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reported that Clinton was “obsessed” (their word) with rumors of a videotape of Michelle Obama denouncing “whitey” in a sermon at Wright’s church. Reporters who covered that campaign had that story repeatedly shopped to them by a high-level Clinton aide.
In their minds, members of the Clinton team surely never thought of themselves as inciting racial divisions. They believed they were merely anticipating Republican incitement. In the face of impending right-wing racism, what choice did liberals have but to rally around the white candidate, in pure self-defense? (I heard this argument myself from a famous movie director and generous Clinton donor at a dinner party in 2008.) It was a highly convenient self-exculpatory argument. I’m not myself suggesting that Barack Obama is an alien with no right to sit in Washington’s chair … but other people will think so, and so what choice do I have but to urge the media to work harder to find a tape of Obama’s wife denouncing white people?
Of course, America did elect and reelect Obama. The Clinton team’s warning (“You can’t win with only eggheads and African Americans,” as Paul Begala instructed Donna Brazile on CNN) proved wrong. Looking back on it now, Hillary Clinton perceives that the true victim of bigotry in the ’08 cycle was … herself.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-victimology-of-hillary-clinton/373129/
As an old white broad, I find it immensely frustrating that white Democrats give the Clintons a pass on their repeated use of the “race card” whenever they view it as politically advantageous for them. Hillary’s use of the “victim card” should be met with total derision. Could the wife of a small southern state governor have carpetbagged her way to a Senate race in NY and won in less than a year? At best, and it still would have been trading on her husband’s name and position, she might have been elected to the Senate from AR and would have been nationally as well known as Blanche Lincoln.
I also find it frustrating that it’s a conservative writer (the one that penned “axis of evil” for GWB) presenting the truth.
Then there’s the “…but I wouldn’t have stayed in that church.” And where did Hillary go to pray? The Fellowship. Creepy and secretive. Doug Coe isn’t fit to shine Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s shoes.
Where the Clinton’s miscalculated in 2008 was expecting the African-American community to behave like abused spouses. When they didn’t and people like Jimmy Carter called them out for using race, out came the “victim card” along with the “woman card” and the “white card.” Summed up from her perches as an honorary member of the Clinton campaign and Fox News commentator by Geraldine Ferraro:
Some things should not be forgotten nor forgiven.
Once the Clintons realized that the African-American community would not behave like abused spouses they called in all of their chips with Tavis Smiley (my best guess) and Tavis went all in for Team Clinton. That almost immediately got Tavis’ Black Card revoked such that he is essentially persona non grata in our neck of the woods.
And ol’ Tavis has continued to demean Obama ever since the man took office. I try hard to avoid him, but the few times I’ve had the misfortune to stumble upon his radio show and he was discussing the President, the naked hatred infesting every word was nauseating.
O’Malley sounds like a decent politician and he’s relatively young too.
I wonder whether it would be better to stick him as VP and as successor to HRC (if she runs), or try running him as POTUS now?
Only if you want to diminish his chances ever to become POTUS.
“Decent and relatively young” are good assets for any POTUS candidate, but may be particularly so in 2016 as many senior citizens and not so decent politicians gear up for their POTUS campaigns.
Don’t know if it’s O’Malley, but I sure wish there was someone to give us a choice. Someone with the potential to win in November. HRC would be a formidable candidate, certainly the Dems’ strongest right now, but boy she turns me off with a lot of what she says. Like “she is not truly well off.” When the campaign gets into gear, I can imagine a lot of folks getting Clinton fatigue.
Has anyone throughly analyzed O’Malley? Who are his advisers? Who are his biggest campaign donors? Does he support charter schools?
My first quick and dirty check is that he’s good on all issues except nukes. No public statements in 2002 and early 2003 wrt to the anticipated invasion of Iraq, but since than has developed a reputation for opposing it. Going so far as to criticize GWB and refused to back down when outrage over his criticism emerged. (Recall that the two MD Senator in 2002, Sarbanes and Mikulski, voted against the IWR. Both have been supporters of O’Malley.
Depends how you define good, I guess. I support nuclear power shrug
Also, he doesn’t sound like he’s opposed to charter schools, but he isn’t championing them either.
It’s hard to find much about donations at first glance, but the PAC affiliated with him looks to put most of its money towards salaries:
O’Say Can You See PAC expenditures
Biggest “group” donors appear to be Lockheed (no surprise) and AT&T.
There are 327 individual donors who gave $200 or more.
Also, didn’t Maryland thoroughly cock-up their own health care exchange?
Yep. I was working for one of the Navigator organizations when it launched. You can make an argument that the fault lies with the contractor, but in any case, the end result was totally unacceptable.
Nuclear power falls apart on cost and risk if the entire fuel cycle is included in the equation. Add in water resource requirements and length of time it takes from siting, designing, construction to bring one of these suckers on-line and they should be non-starters.
The Three Mile Island meltdown may have resulted in re-thinking the wisdom of nuclear power in the US among the general public, but the more powerful factor in halting US construction of Nukes was Whoops.
Is O’Malley an AIPAC stooge?
And post-Fukushima, how smart can you be and still be in favor of nukes?
This is almost a deal-killer for me, just when I was starting to get interested in Walter …
I don’t know, how can you vote for someone who supports fossil fuel based electricity? I’m not a fan of fission power, especially with Generation 2 reactors, but the deaths caused by Western commercial nuclear power is in the dozens while deaths caused by fossil fuels is in the tens of thousands.
Too much of a risk nuclear for a widespread cataclysm just from a single event or mishap. And I don’t put much faith in official figures of deaths directly related to the various incidents since 1979. I suspect they are much much higher.
Of course anyone whooping it up for more drilling or fracking also would be demoted in my book.
Yep. Plus unless we really get some renewables online ASAP it’s our only hope for climate change.
Bad things about Martin O’Malley:
He’s had some questionable policy in the state. I understand that he’s a governor and can only do so much with deficit spending, but his reliance on regressive fees and pension raiding is questionable. I also find his faith in CityStat or whatever the hell it was called to be outright laughable. And I haven’t seen any of TheWire but apparently one of the bureaucratic strawmen from that show was directly based off of him. I’m not sure how an obvious but juvenile ‘O’Malley’s like such and such from this show, so here are a bunch of faux-witty comparisons and references’ campaign would work on him, but it’s there.
That’s really minor in the long run, though. My biggest question about him: how well does he campaign? We already knows how Hillary Clinton campaigns — mediocre, burns bridges, and relies too much on voter’s psychologically projecting a positive or sympathetic image onto her. It’s certainly possible to do much worse than her (see Dole, Kerry, Gore, Dean, almost every GOP Presidential Candidate) but he has a low bar to clear to be considered ‘better’. That said, a lot of candidates can’t even bound that low bar so who knows.
Uh, Gore won. And is better at passionate speech making than most.
The best at retail politics IMHO is Sherrod Brown.
Campaigning is more than just having good policy positions, the enthusiasm of your supporters, a resume that people can respect, and being good at rhetoric (though that’s most of it, admittedly) — otherwise we’d have a President Dean.
Though, man, if I could vote for Sherrod Brown I would in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, he seemed very, very empathetic in not running. Not in the Warren-esque later plausible deniability sort of way, but in no uncertain terms. I’m sure that a committed enough draft could save his mind, but, the most plausible path I see is that O’Malley flames out by mid-2015 after appearing surprisingly strong for a few months, Warren truly doesn’t end up running at all, and Sen. Clinton starts to show weakness. An implausible path, to say the least.
It’s no big deal, though, I’ll be more than happy to vote for O’Malley or Warren instead. It’ll just be like getting two and a half scoops of ice cream instead of three.
Did I miss something, or did you just eliminate all the possibilities you put on the table as possible democrats to get behind?
I was outlining what I saw would be a plausible path for Sherrod Brown to get into the field. Basically, he’s got three problems.
1.) He said that he didn’t want to run in 2016. He was very, very empathetic about this as far as I could tell. That’s a pity and I’d like to think that we could change his mind, but I believe him.
2.) The leftist alternative to Brown would be Elizabeth Warren. I have no problem with her politics and would be happy to vote for her in the primary and general election barring any scandals or incredible gaffes. But she’s THE Democratic leftist consensus choice and if she runs, an O’Malley or Brown or whoever would have a probably impossible task of getting support to coalesce around them.
3.) And of course there’s Hillary Clinton. Considering his reluctance to run, it’s understandable — if a little callow — that he would not want to jump into the primary if it looks like she’ll be unbeatable heading into 2016. If she still looks invincible at the end of 2015 then there’s another obstacle to his candidacy.
Basically, Brown’s biggest obstacles are Warren, himself, and Clinton. If the former doesn’t run/gets abandoned by the base, the latter shows weakness, AND he gets bitten by the Presidential bug then he has an ‘in’. Otherwise, it’s probably not happening.
Flip/superficial blog comments are easy and I’m often guilty of that. Electoral politics are on one level easy and another level incredibly complex. Plus it’s easy to overlook the timing.
As to Sherrod Brown, don’t know if he entered politics with aspirations for high office or if it was an opportunity for him to do the people’s work, or a combination of the two. Doing the people’s work, to the best of his ability, and for all the people, seems to be where he landed sometime early in his career. And for him, the people’s work was the traditional Democratic Party orientation and values that began with FDR.
The rise of the DLC in the Democratic Party, and an unwillingness to conform to the DLC, may have led him to settle for being a member of the House in a secure CD and doing what he could to weaken the pro-corporate, pro-military policies of both political parties. Or perhaps it was the rabid right going after Clinton on personal matters that led him not to seek higher office as there was a messy encounter with his first wife as they were divorcing.
If not for Schumer begging him to run for the Senate in 2006 (totally uncharacteristic for Schumer to do something politically astute), Brown would today still be in the House. He’s smart, hard-working, honest, and wise. Not there for personal power and ego gratification. He’s what in a democracy we should expect of all political office-holders.
Short of a massive draft by millions of people that have also pledged to get all the money, he’s not going to run for POTUS. Short of a massive draft by millions of people that also pledge to get him the money needed, Brown isn’t go to run for POTUS.
Would be an unprecedented and spectacular phenomenon if such a movement came into being. Would catch the wave of a reemergence of liberalism as the prevailing political sentiment by 2016 if it’s not already here. Sort of like in 2007 when people asked could a woman or a black man be elected POTUS and I answered yes but could identify exactly when it became yes other than that it was recent.
Brown would make an excellent VP choice for an Elizabeth Warren. Not for O’Malley because he’s going to need a woman on the ticket.
Maryland has only elected one Republican governor since Spiro Agnew.
Bob Ehrlich and the black guy on MSNBC