O'Malley 2024?

President Biden said something eye-opening on this past Sunday's edition of "60 Minutes" - and it wasn't that the pandemic is over, which everyone knows is a crock.  He said that while he intends to run for re-election in 2024, he hasn't decided yet on whether to run because circumstances may change and force him to reconsider.

In other words, the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination could be there for the taking by any Democrat who wants to go for it.

Which brings me back - as always - to the subject of Martin O'Malley.

One would likely conclude that Martin O'Malley has retired from politics for good.  He himself said in 2019 that he thought his moment as a presidential contender had come and gone, his endorsement of Beto O'Rourke for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was spectacularly ill-advised (as O'Rourke withdrew as a candidate before the year 2020 even started), he did nothing to promote the eventual Biden-Harris ticket (an absence that COVID didn't excuse), his inaction for the Democrats meant that Biden passed him over for Cabinet and ambassadorial posts, and his work for his wife Katie's bid for the Democratic nomination for Maryland Attorney General yielded more failure.  O'Malley hasn't tweeted anything on his Twitter account since Katie - whom one aide to a member of the Maryland state legislature compared to Hitler for her civil rights record - lost her primary.

But even O'Malley would tell you that you have to be at your lowest ebb before you can get to a better place.  Or as that great theologian Steve Miller once said, you know you've got to go through hell before you get to heaven.

If Biden decides not to run, O'Malley is in a perfect position for a comeback.  He still has his impeccable record  as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.  His time in public office is so far back in the past that controversies over his handling of crime in Baltimore will seem trivial compared to everything this country has been through in the past seven years.  Derided as a centrist, many of his policies, from support of public education to promoting mass transit and combating climate change, would certainly appeal to progressives.  And at a time when Republican governors are exploiting the migrant crisis for political gain and apparently getting away with it, we could use O'Malley's voice on immigration, his signature issue in the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign and an issue he remains passionate about.  (His current silence on Twitter during the busing of migrants to northern cities is dismaying.)

Are there liabilities against O'Malley?  Sure.  Many black people still think he's racist for having so many black Baltimoreans arrested for minor offenses when he was mayor of Baltimore.  Republican rumors of his alleged infidelity to Katie and her alleged attempts to bump off his alleged mistress are bound to get new life if O'Malley is the Democratic nominee and his opponent is Donald Trump.  (Trump did in fact repeat those rumors about O'Malley in 2015, but no one cared about the rumors because no one cared about O'Malley.)  O'Malley is also rusty as a campaigner.  If he were still sharp, Katie would be the Democratic nominee for Maryland Attorney General now (her husband's lieutenant governor, current U.S. Representative Anthony Brown, is).  But in looking at the other prospective stand-ins for Biden in 2024, I don't see anyone who could defeat Trump, Ron DeSantis or any other MAGA men.  Bernie Sanders is too old, Pete Buttigieg is too young, Kamala Harris is too unpopular, Jay Inslee is too anonymous, and Gavin Newsom is too . . . California. 

Why Martin O'Malley?  Why not?

I am currently planning a gambit to execute in November, after the 2022 midterms, in an effort to promote an O'Malley presidential candidacy should Biden stand down after one term.  I'm waiting to see how the midterms turn out (Herschel Walker is still competitive for the U.S. Senate in Georgia?) before I go ahead with it. What is it?  Sorry, I'm not going to tell you until after I've done it.  Only one other person, my friend Clarisel, knows what I'm going to do, and she ain't talkin'.

And to those who laugh at me for being a once and possibly future O'Malley supporter, just as they all laughed at O'Malley himself . . . let's see who has the last laugh.  To those sympathetic to my intentions . . . remember, keep your Pop-Tarts on standby. 😉

Katie Browned Out

Katie Curran O'Malley, the wife of former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and the daughter of former Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, has apparently lost the Democratic primary for the nomination to stand for Maryland Attorney General in the fall election to Anthony Brown, her husband's lieutenant governor.  (O'Malley, loyal husband that he is, backed his wife, of course.)  Brown unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2014 and has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2017.

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.

Stand back . . . and have your Pop-Tarts on stand-by. 😉 😋

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.