Martin the Liar

I'm not calling Martin O'Malley (below) a liar for making promises as a presidential candidate that he could never have kept as President.  I'm calling him a liar for saying he could win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.  But I'm not accusing him of lying to his supporters - all ten of us.

The person he lied to was himself.  

In the eight months that he was an active presidential candidate, O'Malley campaigned hard despite the fact that there was never any way he could win the nomination.  You could fit all the celebrities and Democratic office-holders who supported him in a broom closet.  Hillary Clinton sucked up all of the establishment support early, and thanks to Bernie Sanders, O'Malley couldn't get any traction for the anti-establishment crowd.  The Democratic National Committee made damn sure that O'Malley couldn't even be strong enough to be an also-ran (a point of fact reflected by the inconvenient truth that Hillary didn't even mention him in her campaign memoir).  And yet he kept telling himself the big lie that he could win.  Long odds?  No problem, he told himself (and everyone else), he'd faced long odds before in his political career, he could do it again.  I love his reaction to Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb quitting before the primaries and caucuses even started - he was looking forward to a three-person race with Hillary and Bernie, where he could stand out more.  "We've got 'em where we want 'em," he told a CNN reporter without irony.  And yet when he participated in Democratic forums, taking his turn before or between Hillary's and Bernie's turns, no one paid attention to him -  the audiences in these forums disregarded him, and the pundits didn't talk about him afterwards.  At the end of his turn in the November 2015 MSNBC candidates' forum in South Carolina, the camera panned across the audience and showed a black woman shaking her head, symbolizing both O'Malley's problems with black voters and the determination of Democratic women of all races, creeds and colors to make Hillary the nominee.  (I'm not convinced that this moment wasn't staged.)   

Only after the 2016 election was over did O'Malley admit what most people already knew - the Democratic National Committee was out to stop him and everyone else who wasn't Hillary, the media wanted a two-person race between Hillary and Bernie for the party's presidential nomination, and the rules were written specifically to ensure a Hillary nomination - and realize that it hadn't made sense to run for President in 2016.  O'Malley actually said that early in 2017 - "None of it made any sense."  He'd stopped lying to himself.  He finally told himself the truth.  But remember, he wasn't lying to us, his dear supporters.  Because he'd told himself he could win, he believed he could win when he told us so.  As the saying goes, it's not a lie if you believe it.

Now I'm wondering if I've been lying to myself about 2020.  I've been telling myself that O'Malley can win the Democratic presidential nomination and the Presidency in 2020 and that Donald Trump can't destroy American democracy and America itself before then.  Really?  Martin O'Malley as the 2020 presidential nominee of a party full of people who hate him and think he's an annoying schmuck?  Democracy in America still strong after four years of Trump, who's caused more division in America and done more damage to this country's political institutions in eight months than a Ronald Reagan or a George Walker Bush ever did in eight years?  I actually believe things can turn around?  Or is that just a lie that I tell the man in the mirror when I get up in the morning?  I've had serious doubts about all of this, and I've been wondering whether I should just give up and quit this country altogether before Trump realizes that his walls and travel bans can be used to keep people in America as well as out of America.  I keep telling myself things will work out for the better in the end, but I look at the United States in 2017 and realize that . . . none of this makes any sense.

Lying to yourself is worse than fake news.  You can spot fake news if you're sharp enough.  But you can be the sharpest tack in the box and be fooled by your own perspective on reality . . . which may not be connected to reality at all.  When you start to doubt what you tell yourself, that's when you have to wonder if you're being truthful with yourself.

I want to see Martin O'Malley - or, if he doesn't run for President in 2020, someone like him - turn things around and dispose of the Trumpster.  Most of all, I want to believe that it can and will happen.  But I just don't know anymore. :-(