O'Brother

No one is probably going to care at this point, but former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley's wife Katie, who recently retired as a judge of the Baltimore District Court, is running for the Democratic nomination for Maryland Attorney General, a position her father, J. Joseph Curran, once held.

Curran was apparently a very popular Attorney General and was well respected.  Mrs. O'Malley is clearly hoping to follow in her dad's footsteps, and by all accounts, she's qualified.  But she likely won't make it because Anthony Brown, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland who ran to succeed Mrs. O'Malley's husband as governor in 2014 only to be defeated by Larry Hogan, is also running for Maryland Attorney General and currently leads her two to one in pre-Democratic primary polls. But 2022 will likely be good year for Republicans, even in a heavily Democratic state such as Maryland, so the Democratic primaries for Attorney General and for governor are probably contests to see which corpse gets more flowers.  That's one reason why no one is going to care about Katie O'Malley.

Another reason is her husband.  I think it's safe to say that Martin O'Malley's political career is done.  Contrary to what Mark Shields once said, there is indeed another cure for presidential ambition besides embalming fluid.  The other cure is disinterest and ridicule of your very existence by a media complex that doesn't take you seriously.  After four years and change of working to help the Democratic Party and not getting any credit for appreciation for his efforts but getting flak for the sole distinction of being himself, O'Malley sat out much of 2020 - with the pandemic as a reasonable excuse for his inaction - and disbanded his political action committees while giving only tacit support to Joe Biden. The coup de grâce to O'Malley's political future came this October when President Biden announced that his choice for ambassador to the Vatican - a perfect appointment for O'Malley - would go instead to Joe Donnelly, a former one-term Democratic U.S. Senator from Indiana.  As far as I can make out, Martin O'Malley has had it with public service.  He's given up fighting in the public arena because no one (other than myself, I suppose) stood by him when things got rough.  

But I also think Marylanders are tired of all of their state's powerful Irish families and want to give more "diverse" candidates for office a chance, so being a Curran by birth and an O'Malley by marriage are hardly assets for Katie in her bid for Maryland Attorney General.  They're more like liabilities. 

And if that weren't enough, Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke, whom O'Malley supported for the Presidency,  is running for governor of Texas.

I guess political death by total humiliation is what he has in mind.

Let me explain.  He's running as a Democrat for an office no Democrat has a chance of winning, in state that just rigged the rules against Democrats with new voting restrictions, and he's running as a champion of immigrants in a state where the people most likely to vote hate immigrants and as a champion of women's rights in an anti-abortion state where Democratic women still have sour tastes in their mouths from the subservient role Beto's wife played in his ill-advised presidential campaign . . . and he's about to get mocked again by TV political commentators who still haven't stopped laughing over his literal table-hopping and his social-media hogging activities from that same presidential campaign.

Withdrawal from politics isn't the only reason Martin O'Malley won't be backing Beto this time.