My Letter To Martin O'Malley

After two months of a lack of a reply from former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley to my letter urging him to run for President in 2024 if President Biden doesn't stand for re-election, I have decided to make the contents of that letter public.

This is not meant to shame O'Malley (above, while campaigning for the Presidency in 2015 in Iowa) into replying to me or anything like that: rather, sharing this letter is an acknowledgment that a) O'Malley has no interest in running for President again, b) Joe Biden is going to run for re-election in 2024, and c) I should have listened to O'Malley when he said four years ago that he thought his viability as a presidential candidate had passed.  I still thought I made a good argument for a second O'Malley presidential candidacy in my letter, but it's obviously not meant to be . . . like so many other causes I had to give up.

Without further ado, here is the letter:

Dear Governor O’Malley:

I was an ardent supporter of your 2016 presidential campaign, and I found your home address on the Internet. I felt compelled to write you in this time of grave political uncertainty and danger in our nation.

I was on board with your presidential campaign from the very beginning because of your stands on the issues and because of your impeccable record as mayor of Baltimore and as governor of Maryland. I felt that the country and the Democratic Party were ready to turn the page on the Clintons. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the ridicule, dismissiveness, and scorn that you endured as a candidate and I and others endured as your supporters. I had to tolerate the self-righteous bombast of Michael Eric Dyson lashing out at your record on criminal justice in Baltimore as mayor, Nia-Malika Henderson laughing at her own mention of your name, Molly Ball pretending to forget your name, the rudeness of Chuck Todd interviewing you impatiently and inattentively when President Obama was about to appear on TV live at any minute – Mr. Todd’s facial muscles suggested an urgent wish that the President would go live as soon as possible so he wouldn’t have to endure you – and Tamara Keith saying that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee because, apart from Bernie Sanders, there was “no one else,” among other slights.

The slights I found the most offensive were that of Joanna Rothkopf of Jezebel.com mocking your guitar hobby and saying there was a special place in hell for white men who play the guitar in public (by her reasoning, Duane Allman is in the fiery furnace now) and Ed Schultz – whom I had watched religiously on MSNBC and continued to listen to on his podcast after he left that channel – mocking your request for thirty seconds in your last debate with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and declaring that “nobody tuned in to listen to Martin O’Malley.” I never listened to his podcast again after that, because, by his reasoning, I was a nobody. Why would I listen to someone who called me a nobody?

In all that time, I was fuming at the Democratic National Committee for limiting the number of debates to protect Hillary Clinton and deciding to have more of them once you were safely out of the way. And, during the eight months you were an announced candidate for the Presidency, I wrote on my blog about your campaign incessantly – e-campaigning, as it were, promoting your candidacy and your positions. One blog post of mine, titled “Why I Am a Martin O’Malley Supporter,” received the following comment, which I did not publish: “You are obviously an idiot.”

And that is what the press called anyone who voted for you in the New Hampshire primary, eight days after your withdrawal as a candidate because of your poor showing in Iowa. All I can say is, thank God for the three Matthews – Matthew Rosza of Salon, Matthew Yglesias of Vox, and Matt Bai (formerly of Yahoo News) – for being the only political journalists who took you seriously.

On November 7, 2016, I was resigned to begrudgingly accepting a Hillary Clinton Presidency, although I resented her sense of dynastic entitlement to the office and resented the shenanigans the Democratic National Committee pulled to ensure her nomination. I still thought a Trump victory was unlikely but possible. When Trump did win the next day, I thought your fears of a Hillary Clinton candidacy had been justified and you had been vindicated. That is, until you compared Trump supporters to Nazis and Klansmen (the insurrection would prove you right again) and said it was time to fight and CNN’s Jake Tapper flippantly replied, “What exactly do you mean by ‘fight’ here, governor?” Or when you said you “just might” run for President again in 2020 and got greeted with more derision, including the comment from Edward-Isaac Dovere that you so desperately wanted to be relevant that you paid for a presidential straw poll, even though it was a poll you . . . won. What particularly galled me was how much the media took more seriously possible presidential runs from Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson.

Until your January 2019 announcement of your decision not to stand for the Presidency in 2020 and your endorsement of Beto O’Rourke for President, I was hoping you would mount a 2020 presidential campaign because of your positions and your record and, admittedly, because I wanted revenge against everyone who slighted and ridiculed you. I believed that I and other onetime O’Malley supporters would get revenge in the form of seeing you win the 2020 election against Trump and talking the oath of office on January 20, 2021. I even had an idea that the Pop-Tart should be your 2020 campaign’s official campaign food because Pop-Tarts, like revenge, are sweet and best served cold. In retrospect, I am glad you did not run in 2020, largely because of COVID and the crowded field of Democratic candidates that made it virtually impossible for anyone other than Joe Biden to break through.

Now we are in a situation in which Republicans are likely to win control of the House of Representatives, the Senate hangs in the balance and could be decided by one seat, and Donald Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Election deniers dominate the Republican Party and are already plotting to rig the 2024 presidential election, but they may not need to. President Biden has failed to regain the good approval ratings he enjoyed in the first half of 2021. He will be 82 years old a couple of weeks after the next presidential election, and his age alone may be enough reason for people to vote against him, given how people’s facilities begin to fail them after eighty. He is in danger of losing if he runs again.

But in the event that President Biden does not stand for a second term, who would take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket? Pete Buttigieg is too young, Bernie Sanders is too old, Kamala Harris is too unpopular, and Gavin Newsom is too parochial and unlikely to test well outside California. In my mind, there is only one person in the absence of President Biden who could defeat Donald Trump.

That would be you, Governor.

You already have a proven record as governor of Maryland that includes abolition of the death penalty, increased protections for the Chesapeake Bay, expanding public transit, and improving education. You also had a compelling argument for an all-payer health care system, which would have enjoyed broad support if anyone in the mainstream media had let you explain it. Most importantly, you had a strong and bold policy proposal for handling the immigration issue, which included expanding health care to undocumented adults and children already protected from deportation, placing a limit on deporting immigrants who do not have legal documentation, providing potential deportees with legal services, and creating an agency to determine and advise immigration eligibility. Democrats – including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – have never offered any set of proposals so bold. Republicans have not offered any set of immigration proposals at all, unless impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is considered a policy proposal. It was this record and this set of proposals that convinced me to support your campaign for President in the spring of 2015, and your assertion to Rachel Maddow that the United States could send astronauts to Mars and build a high-speed rail system comparable to that of France and Japan only reaffirmed my support.

You also have the experience of running a presidential campaign, as Joe Biden had in 2020 when he had failed to make it past the Iowa caucuses in 2008. You are also so far removed in time from your last public office that any controversies involving your tenure as governor of Maryland or as mayor of Baltimore will be more manageable. It also helps that, at the age of 61 in 2024, you will still be relatively young compared to the Democratic Party’s two most recent presidential nominees.

In short, Governor, I am asking you to consider running for President in 2024 if – and only if – President Biden chooses not to run for a second term. I remain convinced that you are the only Democrat who can fill President Biden’s shoes.

I am a registered independent, not a Democratic Party member. I do have some notable Democratic lineage; my paternal grandfather’s cousin was James H.J. Tate, Democratic mayor of Philadelphia from 1962 to 1972. I changed my registration from Democratic to independent in the 1990s when it became apparent to me that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy and had become too center-right. Your presidential candidacy made me want to become a Democrat again and vote for you in the last-in-the-nation New Jersey primary, but the actions of then-Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her success in sabotaging your campaign left me remaining an independent. President Biden has done a good job moving the party back to its more liberal roots, but he will likely be stymied from going any further and his political capital is in decline. Someone needs to carry the Democratic standard against the Republicans in 2024 if President Biden does not stand for re-election, and that person who steps in his place must be able to offer what you yourself called “new leadership.” You remain the best hope to provide that leadership.

Therefore, I hope that you will seriously consider another presidential campaign in 2024 if the opportunity presents itself. If not, I hope you at least consider a presidential run in 2028 – if, of course, we still have elections with more than one candidate per office by then. And when you win the Presidency, I will eat a Pop-Tart in your honor.

Also, please feel free to search for posts about you in my blog at stevenmaginnis.blogspot.com. I promise you that you will find greater attention there on your political career than there has been in most of the professional media. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Steven Maginnis

Even mentioning that Jim Tate was my grandfather's cousin didn't get his attention.

Meanwhile, I am preparing to terminate a Martin O'Malley Facebook group I took over as an administrator when it was abandoned by its creators after the 2016 presidential election  It should be gone completely by the end of March  There's no use having a Facebook group to support the presidential candidacy of a man who doesn't want to run for President anymore.

Besides, why would I want to keep an O'Malley site up when the former Maryland governor took his site down?

I've also given up Pop-Tarts.  Revenge may be sweet, but I have to cut down.