The Martin O'Malley Farewell

It's over.  

Yesterday, after being silent for a couple of weeks over the holidays, Martin O'Malley announced his plans for 2020.  Those plans exclude another presidential run.

The former governor of Maryland announced his non-candidacy in an e-mail to his supporters.  It reads as follows:

As I wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for you and your family in 2019, I also wanted to let you know that I will not be running for President in 2020.

Thanks to your support and encouragement of our leadership effort, Win Back Your State, I was able to campaign on behalf of more than 125 candidates, traveling to 30 states in special elections and in the midterms. The strong results for Democrats - and for new Democratic leaders in particular - in these midterms, has reaffirmed my faith that our best days are ahead of us.

But I have also learned that my usefulness as a candidate for President has passed. I'm proud of the substance and vision we put forward in 2016 and the record of progress from 15 years of executive experience, but - after all we have been through as a nation - America is looking for a candidacy newer than I can offer.

I made this announcement this morning through an op-ed in the Des Moines Register and other papers. I hope we can find ways in the future to work together for the country we carry in our hearts.

With deep respect and gratitude for your friendship,

Martin O'Malley

So what can I say? I'm disappointed, of course. Disgusted, even. Here was the most highly qualified and most thoughtful candidate to run for for President of the United States in my lifetime, the beneficiary of a solid Jesuit education, a distinguished former mayor of Baltimore who turned that city around (albeit temporarily), and a former governor of Maryland who compiled the sort of record Barack Obama could only wish he'd compiled as President, and the pundits and the party elders refused to take him seriously when he ran for the Presidency in 2016.  And then those same pundits and party elders continued to mock him throughout 2017 and 2018 despite the fact that everything he warned would happen if Hillary Clinton were nominated for President happened.  Though he cites the hunger in the Democratic Party for even newer leadership as a reason to forego another presidential campaign in 2020 and likely forever (a 2024 O'Malley run is possible only if Joe Biden is elected President in 2020 and voluntarily serves only one term due to age - yeah, right! - or, if Trump gets re-elected in 2020, and no one wants that!), the refusal among many to take O'Malley seriously is likely as big a reason for his decision, if not a bigger one.  

(Aside:  I had written and later this month planned to publish a sequel to my January 2018 post compiling O'Malley-bashing comments from this detractors, which had many more O'Malley-bashing comments from many more of his detractors.  Of course it was long.  I deleted it instead, because of the simple fact that O'Malley will not be a presidential candidate in 2020 and also because getting back at his critics at this point is not worth it.)    

So who am I hoping to support for President in the Democratic primaries and caucuses now?  Uh, no one yet.  Maybe not anyone at all.  Remember, I'm an independent.  Martin O'Malley was the only Democratic presidential candidate in the past quarter century other than Barack Obama that made me want to register as a Democrat just so I could vote for him in the New Jersey primary, which is closed to independents (I never actually did get to vote for O'Malley, of course), and he was the only potential 2020 candidate I could solidly get behind.  As of this moment, I see no presidential prospect that I can support unreservedly for the Democratic nomination in 2020.  More likely than not, I will remain an independent and vote only in the 2020 general election for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.  But if that nominee is someone who was named Hillary or Oprah by her mother, don't be surprised if I vote Green again.  After all, the Democrats could nominate a ficus plant for President and still win New Jersey without my vote.     

I would be completely remiss, though, if  I did not mention O'Malley's preference for the Democratic presidential nomination - he's hoping that Beto O'Rourke runs.  I don't know . . . he's not as liberal as O'Malley, if only because he had a constituency in El Paso to consider while in the House of Representatives, and his executive experience is nil.  But I will, as O'Malley himself is fond of saying, keep an open mind.  As for O'Malley, I hope he continues his work with Win Back Your State and gets more Democrats elected to state and local offices in 2019 (there is a gubernatorial election in Kentucky this year, and Democrats have a decent shot at winning it) and 2020.   

And so my 43 months of activism on behalf of Martin Joseph O'Malley come to a close.  He might have been a great President, but now we'll never know.  He just as easily could have become President and disappointed me the way Clinton and Obama did, though, but at least I'll never know that either.

Nothing more to say . . .