Elijah's Cummin'

U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, should have seen it coming (no pun intended there), and he probably did, when Donald Trump slammed him for spending too much time investigating him and not enough time trying to fix the rat-infested Baltimore neighborhoods he represents.  Indeed, Trump angered many a Baltimore resident - and native Baltimorean Nancy Pelosi - by suggesting that the entire city was a hellhole.  

Except that his district, Maryland's Seventh U.S. House District (a map of which is below), includes Baltimore neighborhoods that aren't stereotypical urban ghettos and also includes several suburban and some rural areas, with a good deal of it stretching along the Interstate 70 corridor forty miles west to the town of Mount Airy.  But not only does it include some black ghettos in black-majority Baltimore, it's also a black-majority district - about 54 percent black and 36 percent white, with other groups making up the rest of the district's population.  It's also the second-wealthiest and the second-best-educated black-majority House district in the country. 

Trump's comments are in keeping with his attitude that any black-majority piece of real estate must be a big slumscape.  Kind of weird for a guy whose first properties as a real-estate owner included an apartment house in East Orange, New Jersey, an overwhelmingly black suburb of Newark that has its run-down neighborhoods but also has some charming areas with homes as beautiful as any you'd find in the overwhelmingly white neighboring town of Glen Ridge.  And this isn't the first time Trump has attacked a black congressman representing a black-majority district; just before he moved into the White House (courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz), he attacked Georgia congressman and civil-rights icon John Lewis for problems in his House district, even though the demographics in Lewis' district are similar to Cummings'.  If there's anything Trump can't stand more than a black congressman who can't stand him, it's a black congressman who's investigating him.  And these attacks are perfectly well-tuned to whip up his base and get them to the polls next year.

Trump and his supporters complain that his criticisms of Cummings are not racist but rather a frank examination of how Democratic policies toward the cities and local Democratic control of cities like Baltimore, which is a whole lot better off than one might think (despite former Mayor Catherine Pugh's forced resignation over a book deal gone bad, a continuation of old-fashioned Baltimore corruption), have failed inner-city populations and cities in general.  Someone should send Trump a video copy of native Baltimorean Barry Levinson's 1990 classic movie Avalon, which showed how cities declined as a result of pro-suburban, autocentric policies championed by both parties in the postwar decades.  Then maybe he'll get it.  (Yeah, right.)  This was the same Donald Trump who promised to rebuild our cities and towns but now exploits the problems of urban America to whip up anti-black sentiment.

But then, maybe what Trump is doing now isn't racist this time.  Because as I recall, Baltimore's last white mayor, Martin O'Malley, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 but (again, courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz) never got taken seriously.  I am convinced that, had O'Malley been Trump's opponent in the 2016 general election. Trump would have levied the same blistering attack for Baltimore's failings on him that he did on Cummings.  Assuming, of course, his attempt to identify O'Malley as the father of a single black TV newswoman's child based on a rumor started by Maryland Republicans didn't do the trick. (Irony.)

And you can bet that O'Malley, a Batlimorean by choice and a friend of Cummings, had a lot to say about Trump's tirade.

O'Malley should have run for President in 2020.

Drastic Measures

The issue of criminal justice remains Martin O'Malley's greatest Achilles heel when the 2020 election cycle begins.  O'Malley has coyly hinted that he will run for President then ("I just might," he's fond of saying), but if he does, his oversight of the Baltimore Police Department as that city's mayor will remain an issue for his foes - and he has many in Maryland - to use as a club on him.  Which is ironic, since that's what Baltimore policemen are accused of doing - using clubs.  Among other things.

O'Malley (above, in 2002, when he was mayor of Baltimore) resorted to zero-tolerance policing when he took over the worst city in America for violent crime and used drastic measures to make the once-prosperous industrial city safer.  His policies, though, encouraged an already existing culture of brutality waged against civilians by the police, and much of his approach was challenged - successfully - by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  In January 2017 - ten years after he left office to become governor of Maryland - the U.S. Justice Department, in one of its last actions before Loretta Lynch handed the keys to Jeff Sessions, found numerous violations of the Constitution and of civil rights in investigating the Baltimore Police Department's patterns and practices that many people linked to O'Malley's policies.

The investigation, for the record, primarily looked at the Baltimore police's record in the decade after O'Malley left office, and one of his successors, former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, admitted that change and reform can be slow.  Cops normally violate constitutional rights in Baltimore despite rigorous training, and they're partial to calling blacks by all sorts of racial epithets, and not just that word.  They get brutal with black suspects, and they get furious at and physically brutal against some black residents for just existing.  This is in a city that is two-thirds black.  Officers don't know how to handle sensitive matters that could and do get violent, and they're under pressure to show results to satisfy the city's Comstat system, a police-data system O'Malley initiated and has lauded,  which uses analytics and numbers to achieve efficient results.  

Anthony Barksdale, a high-ranking black police official in Baltimore who headed a squad focusing on the most violent offenders, insisted that the Justice Department's investigation of some circumstances made race more important than it appeared.  Barksdale noted that the massive arrests, stops and crackdowns in targeted neighborhoods was based on not the racial makeup of these neighborhoods but on the violent crimes in them.  "What the [Justice Department] didn't do is overlay the crime map on those stop maps," he says.

Barksdale said there was also training on constitutional issues and admitted that there were violations based on the failure of commanders to reinforce it, but he was optimistic that continued training can lead to greater reform.

Such nuances don't matter in politics.  O'Malley has shown time after time that he is no bigot, especially in his record as governor of Maryland and his commitment to equality for all.  But his failure to get a handle on the criminal element in the Baltimore police as mayor - as opposed to the criminal element the police are supposed to protect people from - will remain a sore spot for him unless he deals with it.  After all, he has the weight of constitutional violation by his police force around his neck, and if he ran for President again he would have to do more than mend fences with black voters - he'd have to tear down the fence and start over from scratch.  Also, imagine an O'Malley still hobbled by his criminal-justice record going up against Donald Trump - blacks might just want to throw up their hands and stay home, crippling an already disabled Democratic Party.

As I publish this, Trump has pardoned former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for defying a court order against the illegal tactics he used to crack down on undocumented immigrants.  O'Malley has never done anything like that - he's a champion of immigrants' rights, incidentally - but given the Baltimore police's reputation for disregarding the law, a Democratic presidential primary opponent might want to draw a parallel between Baltimore and Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) and make it look like Arpaio is O'Malley's brother in arms.  

If O'Malley is going to have a chance in 2020, he's going to have to acknowledge the Baltimore Police Department's mistakes - and his own. Like putting too much faith in Comstat.  "Comstat, or 'goal oriented community policing,' has saved thousands of American lives in cities all across our nation," he recently wrote in an online editorial.  "In some places, the improvement in policing continues as more and more lives are saved. New York and Los Angeles in particular have figured out how to improve public safety while, at the same time, improving public trust  -  the basis of all security for any free people."

Alas, OMalley wasn't the mayor of either of those cities.  He was the mayor of Baltimore, and while he may have inherited a city with a police department that makes the Los Angeles Police Department look like the Mayberry sheriff's office (and it was probably just as corrupt when Thomas D'Alesandro III - Nancy Pelosi's older brother - was mayor of Baltimore in the late sixties, during the last major  Baltimore riot before the Freddie Gray scandal), he didn't leave it in any better shape for the three black female mayors who succeeded him. Without intending to, he may have even left it in even worse shape to some extent.  Yes, Baltimore is a tough town to govern and make safe, and yes, all of these problems existed long before O'Malley was on the scene.  But none of Baltimore's other mayors ever ran for President, either.

The Justice Department's report came out long after O'Malley was forced to withdraw as a candidate for President, so this will just be one more weapon his enemies will use against him in 2020 if he choose to run for President then.  The only reason his record as mayor of Baltimore wasn't a big deal in 2016 was because he wasn't a big deal.  I can assure you, though, that had O'Malley emerged as Hillary Clinton's chief Democratic primary opponent, she would have used his criminal-justice record as Baltimore mayor to destroy him. 

O'Malley did what he did as mayor of Baltimore to fight crime because he believed that drastic measures were necessary.  This time he has to take drastic measures to fight to save his own viability as a presidential candidate.  I'm still for the guy, and I still want him to run for President again, but he has to do and say more than he's said or done so far about his criminal-justice policies.  And now.  And fast.

By the way, I'm not calling him Marty anymore.  He loathes the nickname.  Besides, that's what his worst enemies - not all of whom are in Maryland - call him.  

A Star-Crossed Mayor

He was a charismatic, ambitious Irish-American politician who first gained notoriety when he was elected mayor of one of America's largest cities while still in his mid-thirties.  His mayoral administration was dedicated to improving the quality of life in his city and increasing the effectiveness of the police department.  He made efforts to address persistent problems within his city's large black population.  Many people compared him to John F. Kennedy, and some pundits declared him a rising star in the Democratic Party who might one day become President of the United States - the first President to have served as a big-city mayor since Grover Cleveland.

Unfortunately, a riot stemming from a heavy-handed policing incident in a black slum neighborhood doomed his ambitions for higher office.

No, I'm not talking about Martin O'Malley of Baltimore . . .

. . . I'm talking about Jerome Cavanagh, who served as mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1970.

The resemblance between the two is striking, though, to say the least.  Both Cavanagh and O'Malley set out to prove that a major American city could still be governed competently in spite of systemic machine politics and continued middle-class flight to the suburbs.  Cavanagh was quick to reform the Detroit police and push affirmative-action programs to get more blacks in municipal government, even as his Newark, New Jersey counterpart, Hugh Addonizio, did little to involve blacks in his administration, and Richard J. Daley ignored the need for urban-government and civil-rights reforms as mayor of Chicago.  As mayor of Baltimore in the post-civil-rights era after Baltimore became a black-majority city, O'Malley concentrated on using the CitiStat management program to improve city services and to pinpoint violent crime to get as many criminals off the streets and make black as well as white neighborhoods safe.  The program also helped to spur investment in Baltimore and get people to move there.  O'Malley later claimed that he had reduced violent crime in Baltimore by 39 percent by the end of his two terms, though some crime reporters and O'Malley's political opponents found his methodology to be flawed.  But both men established themselves as mayors who could get things done.

In addition to his reforms, Cavanagh was quick to make Detroit a showcase for smart urban renewal by getting his city to participate in the now-defunct Model Cities program.  This program was an initiative set up by President Lyndon Johnson's administration to find ways to fight urban poverty and improve infrastructure while promoting new development in the form of new skyscrapers and public buildings. Cavanagh secured money to aid economic growth for the city and promote downtown property values.  

It was the bugaboo of race, however, that cast a shadow on their respective careers.  Cavanagh's policies in Detroit failed to address the growing disparity between the city's poor black residents and the number of jobs in the auto industry, as the automakers were beginning to invest more in the suburbs, to which many of the city's white middle class residents were relocating.  The Big Three needed more lateral space than what was available in Detroit proper, and middle-class whites simply wanted lower taxes, better schools and bigger lawns.  Also, affordable housing got short shrift at the expense of the mayor's grandiose plans, and Cavanagh failed to see the growing resentment of the black underclass - this at a time when Detroit was hailed as a model for urban racial harmony.  The 1967 riot dispelled that.  As for O'Malley, his zero-tolerance criminal-justice policy was seen as a contributing factor to the 2015 death of criminal suspect Freddie Gray while in police custody, and the riot that followed Gray's death adversely affected O'Malley's presidential ambitions before he even announced his candidacy for the Presidency.  When the Freddie Gray riot started, O'Malley immediately returned to Baltimore from a vacation in Ireland to stand with black residents in the city's riot-torn neighborhoods (below), despite the fact that he was no longer mayor, but many of the residents refused to interact with him and some of them verbally and virulently scorned those who did.  O'Malley's reconciliatory efforts satisfied few if any Democrats looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton as the party's 2016 presidential nominee.

The taunts against O'Malley came swiftly and quickly, especially from black figures.  Baltimore City's state attorney, Marilyn Mosby, squarely blamed O'Malley for Gray's death and the subsequent riot in spite of the fact that he had left the mayor's office eight years earlier, and professor and pundit Michael Eric Dyson laid into him, declaring that O'Malley had a lot of explaining to do for what Dyson judged to be a racist criminal-justice policy.  Dyson later endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, insisting that she could deliver on the promise of civil rights where Barack Obama had failed.  (Yeah, right.)  But "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah may have given O'Malley the ultimate kiss of death when he had O'Malley on his show: "I loved you in 'The Wire,'" he said to him.  Noah, of course, was referring to the fictional Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti on "The Wire," the crime series developed by O'Malley critic David Simon; Carcetti was a composite of real-life Baltimore politicians, including O'Malley.

However, and this is crucial to remember for those of us who may be pessimistic about O'Malley's future presidential ambitions, there are differences between him and Detroit's Cavanagh.  The 1967 Detroit riot happened on Cavanagh's watch, and he was ultimately responsible for failing to handle it, which Cavanagh himself acknowledged; as noted, Freddie Gray's death and the subsequent riot in Baltimore occurred long after O'Malley had left City Hall, which begs the question as to why his successors as mayor weren't able to correct his criminal-justice policy's shortcomings.  Cavanagh had had the federal government invested in his mayoralty; O'Malley had no such support.  Cavanagh failed at his later bids for U.S. Senator and governor of Michigan; O'Malley became a successful two-term governor of Maryland.  One key thing they both have in common, though is this:  Cavanagh (who died in 1979) was not and O'Malley is not racist.  Both Cavanagh and O'Malley did the best they could to ease urban racial animosity, which is like sweeping back the ocean with a broom.  And Michael Eric Dyson, like so many of O'Malley's critics, is guilty of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by shunning O'Malley, a civil rights supporter and a tireless advocate for the rights of Hispanics, Muslims, and immigrants, in favor of the utterly clueless Hillary Clinton, whose nomination for President by the Democrats led to the election of Donald Trump. Oh, that's better.  

While O'Malley, like Cavanagh in Detroit before him, didn't have the sort of tension with his city's black population as mayor of Baltimore like Daley in Chicago and Addonizio in Newark did, I must admit that I fear his compromised reputation among blacks in his adopted hometown will always be a problem.  Case in point:  When John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Georgia congressman, said in January 2017 that Trump was an illegitimate President because of Trump's possible ties to Russia, O'Malley tweeted support for Lewis, saying, "John Lewis is right. Trump wasn't popularly elected. A fascist candidacy based on racist fears [and] Russian help should never be legitimized."  I kept waiting for someone to go after O'Malley by saying that someone who, as mayor of Baltimore, disregarded civil rights by having so many black men in that city arrested by the police (many of the arrests under O'Malley's mayoralty were in fact repeat-offense arrests) had no business expressing solidarity with Lewis.  To the best of my knowledge, that did not happen.

On balance, though, O'Malley is in better position for a comeback than Jerome Cavanagh ever was.  He has a more solid record for getting results and for being committed to public service as a vehicle to advance the greater good.  His leadership qualities are bound to be reappraised and positively appreciated.