Mrs. O'Malley hasn't conceded yet, but it's only a matter of time. This raises questions about her husband's viability for another presidential run in 2024 should President Biden decided not to seek another term, an issue on the minds of at least three commentators - me, myself, and I.
First, why Katie lost. I have no idea. But there are several conjectures I can offer. Mrs. O'Malley may have simply lost because Brown, criticized for running a bad gubernatorial campaign in 2014, benefitted from the experience and was able to run a much better campaign in the 2022 primary. Another reason may be that Maryland Democrats may have been turned off by what they perceived as dynastic entitlement; Mrs. O'Malley's father was Maryland Attorney General and her husband was governor, and with still-fresh memories of Hillary Clinton - hey, at least Mrs. O'Malley ran for office in her home state rather than go carpetbagging elsewhere - chose not to acknowledge such an entitlement. Martin O'Malley, opening his presidential campaign back in May 2015, said that the Presidency is not a crown to be passed between two families; it appears that Marylanders don't want their Attorney General's office to be a crown held by one woman from two political families.
Another possible reason involves race. Mrs. O'Malley's husband pursued a zero-tolerance approach to crime as mayor of Baltimore, having the police arrest black men for minor offenses (never mind that many of those arrests were for repeat offenses), and some black Marylanders have objected to Katie because they feared that she'd bring the same punitive approach to prosecuting crimes that her husband did in handling those who commit them. Some have even charged that both O'Malleys are highly contemptible as far as the rights of criminal suspects are concerned, particularly black criminal suspects (forget for a moment Martin O'Malley's solid civil rights record as governor of Maryland), a charge likely to stick as long as "The Wire" producer David Simon is still around to talk about it. Also, Anthony Brown, Katie O'Malley's opponent, is black, as is a good deal of the Maryland Democratic Party. Maryland Democrats want diversity in their public officials, and being an Irish Catholic - or, in this case, a woman - doesn't cut it for them.
So where does this leave Martin O'Malley for a possible future presidential bid? I thought that his hand would be strengthened if his wife had won the nomination and the election for Maryland Attorney General because it would have looked good for a presidential candidate like O'Malley having a wife holding statewide elective office - we've never had a President with a spouse holding elective office concurrently (unless you count the seventeen days in which Hillary Clinton served as a U.S. Senator from New York during the her husband's final days as President in January 2001). Now that Mrs. O'Malley has lost, it diminishes her husband - if an O'Malley can no longer win an election in Maryland, how, people will likely ask, could an O'Malley win anywhere else?
On the other hand, maybe Americans don't want a President with a spouse serving as Attorney General of a state adjacent to the District of Columbia. Sure, the President would be focused on national matters, and the spouse would be focused on state matters, so there's no apparent conflict of interest, but just the idea of such a power couple in the White House would remind people of how much they hate power elites.
So far, Martin O'Malley has shown no interest of running for the Presidency again insisting that his usefulness as a presidential candidate has passed. (When Edward-Isaac Dovere heard that, I'll bet he suggested that O'Malley never had such usefulness. 😠) And O'Malley neither got a presidential appointment from Joe Biden nor lobbied for one, perhaps because he was focused more on helping his wife's political career. But a lot can happen between now and 2024, and that's why I hold out hope that Martin O'Malley can come back and finally get revenge against all of the pundits, Democratic operatives, bloggers and Twitter addicts who ridiculed him all throughout his 2016 presidential campaign and even for a year or so thereafter.
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