Martin O'Malley, Won't You Please Come Home?

Soon after the Dobbs abortion opinion first draft from the Supreme Court leaked, I found this meme on Instagram.

So I made this meme in response.

With Roe v Wade about to fall by the wayside and possibly every other freedom standing between us and a Republican President's declaration of martial law as well,  Hillary Clinton's supporters are once again bashing everyone who voted for a third-party candidate over Hillary in 2016, including those who had voted against her in the Democratic primaries, and letting Trump appoint all of those Supreme Court justices.  In response to those people, who never considered the idea that Martin O'Malley or Bernie Sanders could have actually beaten Trump in 2016, I offer the following meme: 

What don't Hillbots get?  She was a bad candidate, she was too polarizing to have enough mass appeal to win a popular majority (she only got 48 percent of the vote for President), and the only reason she was the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was because the Democratic National Committee scared off or punished anyone who challenged her. The end. 

If I may now return to Martin O'Malley . . ..  O'Malley has kept a low profile since his endorsement of Beto O'Rourke for the Presidency, which more or less killed O'Malley's political career.  Given his lack of interest in campaigning for Joe Biden in 2020, it makes sense that he wasn't appointed to a top administration job.  If he pops up at all anywhere these days, it's his support for his wife Katie's campaign for Attorney General of Maryland - her dad's old job.  Most of O'Malley's tweets on his Twitter feed are in fact retweets from Katie's Twitter account.

None of this changes the fact that O'Malley was right about Trump in 2016 like Hillary Clinton was but was also right when he said that Hillary couldn't win the Presidency - in fact, his wife was the first person he said that to.  No one ever apologized to him for refusing to take him seriously and for mocking his own presidential ambitions, which continued even after Trump was sworn in as President.  With President Biden in deep trouble politically over inflation and Democrats saying privately that the party really ought to consider someone else for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Martin O'Malley may want to rethink his assertion that his "usefulness as a candidate for President has passed," even though pundits tend to agree with him; O'Malley's name never comes up as a possible 2024 contender.  Nothing new there, considering how the press always belittled him.

But he's still worth considering.  He has a record as mayor of Baltimore and as governor of Maryland that brought more positive than negative results, and the negative results - overpolicing in Baltimore when he was mayor, tax increases in Maryland when he was the state's governor - can be finessed.  And he'll only be 62 in January 2025, young by today's standards.  And if his wife gets to be First Lady and remain Attorney General of Maryland, should she be elected - now that would be a presidential power couple! 

I would love for O'Malley to run for President again, of course, but not only am I not expecting it, I don't plan to join his campaign if he does.  The fact is that, after working tirelessly to promote his 2016 presidential candidacy online and drum up support for him in Iowa only to get nowhere, get ridiculed online for my support for O'Malley, see the "inevitable" Hillary Clinton get the nomination and lose the presidential election to Donald Trump, I don't want to support any particular presidential candidate anymore.  My support for a presidential candidate now begins with entering a voting booth to cast my general-election ballot and ends when I've come out of the booth after having cast it.  Because, as with so many other things in life these days, I don't want to get involved in a political campaign anymore.  I've pretty much lost my idealism.

This is nothing new, really.  Bill Dixon, the manager of the 1988 presidential campaign of Martin O'Malley's mentor, Gary Hart, never worked on a political campaign ever again after the sex scandal that forced Hart out of the running thirty-five years ago this month.  Because of the media circus the scandal created, Dixon was too disillusioned to bother with another campaign after that.

I know exactly how he felt.