Autopsy Dissection

A truncated version of the Democratic Party's autopsy of the party's 2024 election loss to Trump is out, and it essentially says that the party didn't relate to voters enough.

Thank you, Captain Obvious!

I have no hope in the Democratic Party learning from its mistakes, mainly because it never has - at least not in the past 45 years.  Also, progressives and moderates see the failure of the party to communicate effectively with voters see the results of the autopsy - such as they are - and derive entirely different takeaways.  Progressives say that Kamala Harris lost because the party wouldn't condemn Israeli atrocities in Gaza (which the autopsy did not mention) and threw marginalized groups under the bus while not talking enough about issues like climate change.  Moderates - and sympathetic ex-Republicans like Rick Wilson - say that Harris lost because they were afraid to offend marginalized groups - hence the party's failure to respond to the Trump campaign's attack ads about transsexual issues - and talked too much about issues like climate change and not enough about the economy.

Both progressives and moderates have this much in common - they both despise DNC chairman Ken Martin.     

Martin is considered a party hack who thinks that all he has to do is tweak the practices of the mainstream Democratic Party and deliver a milquetoast message that tries to appeal to progressives and moderates but ultimately satisfies neither.  The only Democratic strategist who has championed him in recent months is Simon Rosenberg, who insists that Martin is doing the work to strengthen state parties in states dominated by Republicans that Democrats had previously written off.  In other words. Rosenberg is praising Martin for bringing the same pablum message to Alaska, Texas, Iowa and North Carolina that Democrats tried in all seven swing states in 2024 to no avail.  And lest you think that Simon Rosenberg is a seasoned Democratic operative who knows Ken Martin better than I do and therefore I shouldn't critique him so harshly, I need to remind you that Rosenberg was the chap who spent the 2024 election campaign saying that he'd rather be a Democrat than a Republican ("I'd rather be us than them")  and that the Democrats were winning but hadn't won yet.  

The day after the election, I commented on one of Rosenberg's YouTube videos, saying, "I'd rather be them than us."

This disagreement between progressives and moderates, by the way, is not only toxic, it could undermine Democratic chances of winning back one or both houses of Congress.  Take the U.S. Senate race in Michigan, for example.  Progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is leading in the Democratic primary polls over two women, Mallory McMorrow and Hayley Stevens, who are more in the vein of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.  Progressives like noted centrist-basher Jennifer Welch are rooting for al-Sayed to win, while veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, who can't stand progressives for being so sanctimonious and elitist, is hoping that one of the women withdraw from the campaign to avoid splitting the anti-El-Sayed vote.  If the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party can't be united in the primaries, how can they be united in the general midterm elections?  

This division in the Democratic Party has been evident for a decade, from the divide between moderate Hillary Clinton and progressive Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign to the 2025 DNC chairman election in which the chief contestants were the moderate Ken Martin and progressive Ben Wikler.  In both contests, a third candidate offered a more unifying strategy to build up the party - Martin O'Malley.  In both cases, he was ignored and came in third place - both times too distant a third place to matter. 😡 

Nothing To See Here, Folks

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has conducted an autopsy on the 2024 presidential campaign (thus, it simultaneously conducted an autopsy on Kamala Harris' political career) to see what went wrong, aside from everything.  The report is now completed and awaiting review.

Except for one thing: DNC chair Ken Martin (below) won't release it to the public.

Martin is trying to rebuild the Democratic Party after it lost a great deal of credibility with voters in 2024 and he should be doing the opposite of what Trump does by calling for full transparency in how to run things.  Yet, Martin, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, won't share with anyone his committee's findings on why Harris lost in 2024. 

Maybe he's afraid to admit to anyone that, yes, perhaps it was a mistake to nominate a black woman with a Jewish husband to run for President.  More likely, he found a damning defect in the party's messaging that might offend a key demographic in the party's coalition - say, that the party shouldn't have campaigned so much on the rights of non-heterosexuals when more people wanted to hear about the economy.  And short of this report being leaked, we'll never know just what the main finding was.  But it takes a lot of gall to lead a party demanding the release of the Epstein files (which I support) for the sake of transparency while keeping the DNC 2024 autopsy report under wraps. 

As for Martin's tenure on running the Democratic National Committee and thus, by extension, the Democratic Party, I can't evaluate how well he's been doing his job, because I frankly can't find any evidence that he's doing anything.  He's not out there answering Trump's lies, and he's given candidates for office minimal, almost token support.  Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia owe their gubernatorial election victories to themselves and to their talented campaign teams, not Martin, and I think I can safely assume that Martin and the DNC gave no genuine support to Zohran Mamdani in his New York City mayoral campaign.  Releasing the autopsy report on the presidential election that broke America is one of the many things, in fact, that Martin has not done.

Once again, Martin O'Malley, Maryland's sixty-first governor, has been vindicated for his warnings despite the fact that no one seems to care.  (Wait - did I just type "seems to"?)  O'Malley had been calling for a hands-on approach to down-ballot elections ever since he was in his first gubernatorial term in Maryland, warning the DNC back in 2009 - 2009! - that the Republicans were already doing the groundwork necessary to gain more power in state legislatures, as well as win congressional seats and governorships, with the knowledge that those who control the state legislatures control congressional redistricting. O'Malley's advice went unheeded, and in 2010 the Republicans won up and down the ballot all over the country.  Then-DNC chair Tim Kaine was deposed, but his successor was Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whose role in screwing up the 2016 presidential campaign you already know about.

Anyway, O'Malley ran for DNC chair in early 2025 after quitting his job as Social Security Administration commissioner (before Trump could fire him), and he'd already shown what it takes to win elections for every available office, given his Win Back Your State (WBYS) political action committee's success in helping to flip fourteen state legislative chambers to the Democrats in 2018 . . . success that the mainstream press and even The Nation declined to acknowledge.  Given all that - and given that Democrats likely confuse WBYS with an AM radio station in a little Illinois town southwest of Peoria with those same call letters - O'Malley finished a distant third in a three-person field (sound familiar?) in his bid for DNC chair, mainly because no one knew who he was (sound familiar?).

Times may change, but one thing remains constant - no matter how many times Martin O'Malley shows how hip he is to the Democratic Party's troubles, all Democrats hear coming from him is a faint buzzing.  And rather than listen to what he has to say, the Democrats would rather try a different guy to run their party because he has a more impressive CV in party operations.

Martin ran the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party for fourteen years beginning in 2011 and has a record of success in Minnesota, having gotten the state party out of debt and won numerous elections.  When you realize that Minnesota hasn't elected a Republican U.S. Senator since 2006, hasn't elected a Republican governor since 2006, and hasn't been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, though, it's hard not to think that, at the time of his elevation to DNC chair, Martin was already coasting. 

Where's Ken?

Martin O'Malley must have a sixth sense.

He was right when he said that the Democratic National Committee's failure to concentrate on down-ballot elections in 2010 would lead to a Republican blowout.  He was right when he said that Hillary Clinton could not beat Donald Trump in 2016.  And when Trump won again in 2024, O'Malley must have known what was coming at the Social Security Administration - Musk firing everybody there - when he quit at the end of November and decided he was better off running for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship to help the party fight back.

But after a decade of O'Malley being out of elective office, O'Malley found out that the Democrats still don't care about him.  The chief contestants for the DNC chairmanship election were Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Martin (below) prevailed in the election last month.

Ominously, Will Saletan of The Bulwark said that O'Malley, in addressing the DNC, gave the clearest and sharpest speech in making his case for what he felt the Democrats needed to do going forward.  But, as usual, Democrats didn't want to hear it.  (Unless, of course, Democratic committee members who elected the chair wrote in "Martin" because they were voting for O'Malley by his first name and the votes got miscounted for Ken Martin, but I doubt that.)

As soon as he became party chair, Martin published a memo, titled "Democrats Will Fight Against Trump's War on Working People."  In it, Martin said that too many Americans see the Democratic Party as the "party of the elites" and the Republican Party as the "party of the working class."  Martin also pledged to get the party out in the country and essentially follow Howard Dean's old fifty-state strategy, going on a national tour of his own that started in early February.  Talking to NBC News, Martin said, "It's time for the DNC to get out of D.C. That means getting out of our comfort zone, having tough but honest conversations with voters, and showing that we're willing to fight for people."   He continued, "It's time for Democrats to show up in all 3,244 counties—red, purple, blue—to make our case."

So where is he?

No, really where is he?

As far as I know, Martin is still on his tour.  But I don't hear about it much - and I've been getting most of my news from anti-Trump podcasts.  The hosts of these podcasts want to know where Martin is, too, and they have more access to what goes on in Washington politics than I do.

This is no small deal.  The end of Joe Biden's political career and the spectacle of Kamala Harris (this is the first time I've mentioned her name here in five weeks, and it may be longer still before I mention it again) being forced into early retirement have left a leadership vacuum in the Democratic Party.  That "deep bench" of Democratic talent hasn't yielded a person who could lead the party into the 2026 midterms and beyond with a positive, inspiring message.  There are no governors who have shown a desire to take up the Democratic mantle.  In Washington, you have New Yorkers Charles Schumer as Senate Democratic leader and Hakeem Jeffries as House Democratic leader - and even though the word "leader" is in their titles, looking to these Brooklyn bumpkins for leadership is like running up to the bridge on a sinking ship and finding out that the captain is Daffy Duck.

Therefore, Ken Martin, as the leader of the Democratic Party's national committee, is the de facto leader of the party at large.  And he'd better start acting like one. Republican National Committee chairs have always acted like the chief honcho in the GOP, even when a Republican is President. As a result, people knew who Lee Atwater, Haley Barbour,  Reince Priebus, and Ronna McDaniel were.  The less media-savvy Ken Martin is as much a cipher as his predecessor Jamie Harrison was. 

Until Martin gets his sea legs as party leader, the Democrats will have to rely on free agents among those in elective office - Eric Swalwell of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Jamie Raskin of Maryland in the House and Chris Murphy of Connecticut in the Senate.  But the party really needs someone to lead from the front.  Martin O'Malley, who knows a thing or two about that sort of thing, could have provided that leadership for the party, if not for the country as President.  But again, Democrats weren't interested.    

With the threat of Trump possibly executing dissenters under martial law, let's hope Democrats don't get bored . . . to death.

He's Back . . . Again.

Just when I thought Martin O'Malley's story had an ending, and a happy one at that . . . the semi-legend continues. 😉 

O'Malley resigned as commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) in late November, after only a year and change on the job.  He instituted a number of reforms at the SSA and streamlined the bureaucracy in his brief tenure as commissioner before deciding to move on - a decision he wouldn't have made, I'm sure, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election.

Instead, O'Malley is running for the job many of his supporters - all twelve of us - were promoting him for in 2016 when Trump won the White House the first time . . . chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

On paper, O'Malley looks like a shoo-in for DNC chair.  He's held three executive positions in public office (mayor, governor, SSA commissioner), he knows how to repeat a message and not make it sound stale when you've heard it for the 2,314th time, he has appealing policies, and he has a solid record of achievement.  But he has stiff competition from Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin, who is known for his communication skills and his desire to reach out to as many different demographic groups as possible and make everyone in the Democratic Party understand the stakes they have in ensuring the party's success, and Ben Wikler, the chairman of the state Democratic Party in Wisconsin, where he's had big successes in a state more politically divided than the country is in getting Democrats elected statewide.  Wikler, for his part, believes that the Democrats need to follow the Republicans' example and start "a nationwide permanent campaign, with a battle plan and resources for every state and territory in the country."

Also, both Martin and Wikler are younger than O'Malley, which is a 180-degree flip from when he was the youngest 2016 Democratic presidential candidate among the top three contenders and was shamed for what was perceived to be ageism-charged slights against the (much) more popular Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  At 62, O'Malley isn't a senior yet, but as the one contender among the top three candidates for the DNC chair who's old enough to have a grandchild in fifth grade, he certainly looks the part of an aging patriarch.

I'm not a Democrat - I prefer to maintain politically independent, even in New Jersey, a closed-primary state - so I will not express a preference for anyone in the DNC chair campaign.  But I will wish O'Malley well.  And may the best candidate win.

Which is another way of saying that I hope Marianne Williamson - another DNC chair candidate - doesn't get it.     

The picture of Martin O'Malley shown above is a screenshot from a YouTube interview he did on one of the site's many podcasts.  Notice that, immediately behind O'Malley's left shoulder, is a portrait of him . . . unfinished, much like Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait of George Washington, and, despite being framed, propped up against the wall, not yet ready for proper hanging.  How symbolic.  Because, contrary to what many people may have thought many times before, Martin O'Malley's story is a story that has yet to be completed. 

He's IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's official.  Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, who could have been the 45th President of the United States if not for Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigging the Democratic presidential nomination process, is now the leader of something smaller but no less of a big deal.  He is now the new commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

Once he gets settled into his new job after the holidays, he'll have his work cut out for him.  Social Security is expected to go bankrupt by its one hundredth birthday in 2035, and the SSA has enough trouble paying its recipients today.  Thankfully, O'Malley is up to the job because of his own obsession with everything senior pensions are about - numbers.  He knows numbers, he knows how to add and subtract them, he knows how to crunch them.  He can figure out how to make the system work the way it's supposed to.

Maybe O'Malley wasn't necessarily a good fit for the Presidency after all, since that office is about more than just smarter and more efficient government.  It's about relating to people, being the voice of the nation, and embodying the heart and soul of America - everything Joe Biden excels at.  O'Malley is a solid administrator and governor - "governor" meaning, at its core, "one who governs" - but he's never been proven to lead in the same way Bill Clinton or Barack Obama led.  O'Malley has the same abilities to run an administration efficiently in the same sense that Michael Dukakis did, and, needless to say, Dukakis never became President.

So that's it.  Martin O'Malley has the perfect job for his number-crunching, smart-government approach to public service.  And I'd like to thank those who felt as ticked off by how O'Malley was treated in 2015 and 2016 for following me.  I was happy to be not only your voice, but also your warrior, your justice, and your retribution.  We won the war, we've gotten justice, and our retribution is at hand.  Not the way we wanted it, necessarily, but we still got it.  And now  . . .

 . . . time for a Pop-Tart.

Sweet revenge best served cold. 😄

         

HE'S BACK!!!

Martin O'Malley is back.  And this time, he's coming back for a job he doesn't have to get elected to.

President Biden just appointed O'Malley to be the commissioner of the Social Security Administration.  If the Senate confirms him, O'Malley would be in charge of the most popular social program in the country and face the task of how to pay not only the 70 million citizens who rely on it today but also ensure its survival beyond 2034, when the system would be able to pay benefits for only four out of five dependents.

"Governor O'Malley is a lifelong public servant who has spent his career making government more accessible and transparent, while keeping the American people at the heart of his work," President Biden said in a statement. "As Governor [of Maryland], he made government work more effectively across his administration and enhanced the way millions of people accessed critical services."

Too bad Vice President Biden couldn't say the same thing about O'Malley in 2015, when the former Maryland governor announced his presidential candidacy.

O'Malley is known to be a policy wonk and a numerically centered technocrat, which is probably why he wouldn't have gotten the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination even if Debbie Wasserman Schultz hadn't put roadblocks in his way.  For a presidential candidate, such qualities  - which happen to be helpful traits for an actual President in office - are a non-starter, but for leading a bureaucracy, its a positive boon! 

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, endorsed O'Malley, calling him "a longtime Social Security champion who "supports expanding Social Security's modest benefits, not cutting them."  That should be enough to enable his confirmation, but who knows, Bernie Sanders may still have some resentment over something O'Malley said about him during the presidential campaign - not the 2016 campaign, the 2020 campaign.  (Remember this?) Or maybe Kirsten Gillibrand will block him for opposing Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in 2016. Or maybe Elizabeth Warren will block him because she thinks he's a schmuck. 

If O'Malley gets the job, though, he has an excellent chance of rescuing Social Security and be the hero he's obviously always wanted to be.  And though he's emphatically ruled out another run for the Presidency, whatever success he has running the Social Security Administration might make him reconsider that decision. 😊  

Letter From Martin

Just when I thought I would never hear from Martin O'Malley after writing him a letter back in November 2022,  I got a letter yesterday from the former governor of Maryland! 

Mr. O'Malley wrote me to tell me how much he appreciated my letter.  But that's all I will say about it, because it was actually a personal letter.  I don't think I would be doing him any justice or favors if I repeated here what he wrote to me.

I can say this much.  He will not be running for President in 2024.

But of course, there's always 2028 . . .. 😊

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.

Martin O'Malley - The End (Or, An Irish Wake)

I'm done.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley a letter urging him to consider running for President again in 2024 if President Biden were to decide not to stand for a second term.  Now, friends. there was one of two things O'Malley could have done, and one was to write me back saying that not only was he considering another presidential campaign in 2024 if Biden doesn't run again, he would even consider challenging Biden for the nomination - which wasn't likely, and I didn't expect it - and the other was that he would write me back and thank me for my support of his political career going back seven years but he truly believed that his time as a presidential prospect had come and gone and he had no desire to return to the political arena in any way, shape or form, which was what I expected, but there was a third possibility that I hadn't stopped even once to consider, and that was . . .

Crickets.

That's right, crickets.  Though it's been six weeks, O'Malley hasn't responded to my letter.  I think I can interpret his silence as a no.  It's a safe bet that he meant what he said back in 2019 when he said his moment as a viable presidential candidate had passed, which was why he instead endorsed Beto O'Rourke for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  He was wrong about Beto, of course (and I have more to say about the former Democratic wunderkind later on), and I hope that he would realize that he was also wrong about his own future political prospects. Arizona congressman Morris Udall once famously declared presidential ambition was a disease to be cured only by embalming fluid, but there's now a second cure for presidential ambition . . .  utter ridicule, which was what O'Malley got all through 2015 and 2016 and even got as soon as Trump's presidential term began, when O'Malley hinted that he might run in 2020.  

A politician still burning with presidential ambition wouldn't pull the plug on his own Web site.  Nor would a politician still burning with presidential ambition disband his political action committee (PAC), which is what O'Malley did to Win Back Your State, a PAC devoted to helping Democratic state legislative candidates.  And a politician still burning with presidential ambition would have campaigned for Joe Biden in 2020 despite the threat of an out-of-control virus, which would put said politician in good standing with President Biden for a Cabinet or ambassadorial post.        

But then, Martin O'Malley has just accepted what is likely a much better gig - chieftain of the O'Malley clan, which involves organizing the clan gathering in Ireland in June 2023.

I've concluded that an O'Malley Presidency will never happen, especially after all of the bad luck O'Malley has had.  Murphy's Law has hung over his head like a cloud since he left the governorship of Maryland, as evidenced more recently  by his wife Katie's failure to win the Democratic nomination for Maryland Attorney General.  President Biden's move to make the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary - a primary O'Malley would have no chance of winning, given his relative unpopularity among black Democrats - the first Democratic presidential primary in the nation is a fatal blow to any remaining desire to win the White House that O'Malley might have had.

So that's it - one more thing I'm giving up on.  And to be honest, writing O'Malley and sending that letter to his home address was probably in bad form, as I likely violated his privacy.  Sending the letter to his law office would have probably been a better idea.  It would have been something though, if he had resolved himself to make another try for the White House because of my letter.  Maybe it's true that one person can make a difference, but that ne person was never going to be me.

And there's my Irish wake for the political career of Martin Joseph O'Malley.  See you 'round the pubs!

Carolina Bound

Last month, as you will recall, I wrote a letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley asking him to consider running for President in 2024 if President Biden does not.  After nearly a month, I still haven't gotten a reply.  But the political news from the past week has all but made that moot.  Because if there was any doubt about Biden's plans for 2024, that doubt was swiftly quashed with Biden's successful effort to get the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to change the order of the schedule of the presidential primaries and caucuses.

President Biden requested that South Carolina be the first state to hold a primary for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination on February 3, followed by the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucus three days later.  Georgia would hold its primary on February 13, and Michigan would go next on February 27.  All of these dates are Tuesdays except for South Carolina's date, which is on a Saturday; Saturday primaries have been the standard there.  The DNC voted on the change and passed it overwhelmingly. 

Oh, Joe's running, all right.

Biden argues that South Carolina is more demographically representative of the party, with its large black population, and of the country, and thus it makes sense that South Carolina Democrats set the pace with their choice.  (The South Carolina Democratic Party is majority-black.)  It's also no coincidence that Biden won the 2020 South Carolina primary after biting the big one in the previous three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.  I'm sure that South Carolina's Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn is pleased.  I'm sure that DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, another South Carolinian, is also pleased.

The change poses a great deal of problems, though.  Here's the first one.  No one is going to object to stopping Iowa from going first after it botched the reporting of the results of the 2020 caucus to the point where it hardly mattered that Pete Buttigieg won it.  But refusing to let New Hampshire go first runs afoul of a New Hampshire state law that demands that its presidential primary be first, with no ifs, ands or buts about it.  That could be a sticky wicket.  Second, South Carolina is such a strongly Republican state that it becomes meaningless for Democrats in the general election, as it hasn't voted Democratic for President since 1976.  Third, primaries are run by states, not parties, so South Carolina's Republican governor and Republican legislature would have to sign off on any change - and unless the GOP moves up the South Carolina primary to first-in-the-nation status to help former South Carolina Republican governor Nikki Haley, another possible 2024 presidential candidate, it won't do so (especially when Donald Trump wouldn't want competition from Haley, his former U.N ambassador).  Fourth, despite the fact  that New Hampshire's primary would take place three days after South Carolina's, so much focus would be on the Palmetto State, with its larger area and population and its bigger media market, that it would give the retail politics of New Hampshire, where presidential candidates can meet voters face to face and accumulate supporters one small living room or country inn at a time, short shrift.  The greater expanse of land and people in South Carolina prevents that sort of thing there.  That would mean a tougher time for dark-horse candidates like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton from breaking through.  Joe Biden himself was a dark horse in both his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns, but he never made it to New Hampshire in either try and came in fifth there on his third try in 2020, and, again, it's no coincidence that he doesn't want New Hampshire to go before South Carolina. 

The fifth problem is that Democratic presidential hopefuls who have the best interests of black voters at heart but don't necessarily connect well with black voters have no chance of getting momentum out of South Carolina.  After his difficulties with blacks in his hometown of Baltimore over policing when he was mayor, which crippled his 2016 presidential run, I doubt that Martin O'Malley could make a go of it in South Carolina even if he runs in 2028.  Pete Buttigieg would also have problems with black voters in South Carolina after his own policing issues from when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  Both O'Malley and Buttigieg also suffer from being the type of  presidential candidates who look like Presidents out of central casting and appeal to white yuppies, much like Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, or the horrible John Edwards, and black voters have historically resisted such candidates.   

The 2028 presidential hopeful who benefits most from this primary schedule change is Kamala Harris, simply by being black and having a good rapport with the black voters who form the Democratic Party's backbone.  Remember also that Jim Clyburn said she should be Biden's heir apparent.  Aside form the obvious fact that Democratic presidential heirs apparent (Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton) never pan out, Kamala Harris is extremely unpopular and has never been tested in a presidential campaign.  (Her 2020 run imploded before anyone even cast a ballot or participated in a caucus head count.)  The Democratic Party doesn't just need a candidate who can play well among South Carolina Democrats in 2028; it needs a candidate who can pay well nationally.  Who knows - maybe the 2028 primary will actually produce someone like that.

As for Martin O'Malley . . . I'd better get used to the idea that he will likely never be President, just as we'll likely never send humans to Mars or build a high-speed passenger rail network at home.  O'Malley once said that he believed the the U.S. was capable of doing both at a forum during his 2016 presidential campaign, but his Kennedyesque call to greatness obviously impressed no one in the audience.

Oh yeah, the forum where O'Malley spoke was in South Carolina.   

Why O'Malley NOW?

I sent my letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley five days ago, right after Election Day, when it was already apparent that the Democrats would defy expectations and keep the Senate as well as win key state offices such as governorships and secretary of state offices.

President Biden now looks much stronger should he choose to run for another term.  Given all that, do I think I wasted time, paper and ink writing O'Malley (below) and urging him to run for President again if Biden doesn't?

  

No, I don't.

The midterms weren't a red wave, but they weren't exactly a vote of confidence in the blue team, either.  The Republicans are still likely to win the House.  A Republican House is certain to investigate Biden, his son, Anthony Fauci, Alejandro Mayorkas and others for various reasons.  Would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy will not advance any legislation to help President Biden's agenda, and he will likely give more power to the MAGA wing of the House Republican caucus to preserve his own power.  Over 180 election deniers won public office last week.  Seven out of ten Americans - including this American - believe that the country is headed on the wrong track.  Christian nationalism is still on the rise.  We still haven't completely gotten COVID under control.  President Biden's approval rating has been in the dumps since the Delta strain of COVID hit in the summer of 2021.  And while we may yet lick COVID, there is still no cure for the common birthday; Biden will turn eighty years old this month and slipups like when he called Cambodia "Colombia" are bound to occur more often.  And if Trump isn't the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, the GOP will no doubt nominate a much younger candidate - Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin - and be able to campaign on offering "new leadership."   

Though he will be 61 in 2024, OMalley is still a good deal younger than the two most recent Democratic presidential nominees.  he's proven he can get stuff done.  He's promoted policies like all-payer health insurance, the best idea you've never heard of (mainly because the moderators of those rigged 2016 Democratic presidential debates made sure he couldn't bring it up - especially CBS's John Dickerson).  And after nearly a decade out of office, he'll be rested and ready for 2024 . . . and he's still in good shape.

But what does O'Malley himself think?  I'll let you know if I hear back from him. 

Dear Governor O'Malley . . .

I'll offer my views of the midterm election results (such as they are) later.  But for now, I am ready to break my silence on my "secret plan" for spurring a future Martin O'Malley presidential campaign.  

I wrote a letter to him asking him to consider running for President again. 

That's right.  A letter.  Not an open letter somewhere, or a fantasy letter I had no intention of sending - a real letter, a postally sent letter, the sort of letter we used to write before e-mail was invented.

How did I do that?  How did I get O'Malley's address?  I got his address - his home address - off the Internet and I verified it.  (I will not, however, share his address or the identities of the sites I used to find and verify it.)   The body of my letter is confidential, but I will say this much; I wrote asking him to consider a presidential run in 2024 if and only if President Biden doesn't run again, arguing that I saw no chance of a successful 2024 presidential campaign from Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom.

Or Tim Ryan.  Especially Tim Ryan.  Two years after Democrats made it clear that they didn't want Ryan to run for President, Ohio voters made it clear that they didn't want Ryan to run for anything.  (I didn't mention Ryan in my actual letter.  Again, I'll save my comments on Ohio and other battleground states for another time.)     

I know that personally appealing to the former Maryland governor to run for President again despite his ignominious loss in 2016 is a long shot, and he made it clear in 2019 that he thought his viability as a presidential prospect has passed.  But Beto O'Rourke - whom O'Malley backed the former future Texas governor's 2020 presidential run - has seen his viability as an active politician pass, and the other leading prospects don't have any viability.    Folks, like Buttigieg, Sanders, Harris, and Newsom have star power or righteous indignation.  O'Malley has a record of achievement.

Anyway, I am mailing the letter today, and then I am going to sit back and wait for a reply.  We'll see what happens.

Keep your fingers crossed and your Pop-Tarts at hand. 😉

Let O'Malley Be O'Malley

In the past seven years, I've been vexed by the same old question.  We all know why Martin O'Malley didn't click as a presidential candidate with the media; they flat-out hated him.  But why, why didn't he connect with the voters?  Lis Smith seems to have the answer.

Lis Smith is a Democratic operative who was the deputy campaign director for Martin O'Malley's 2016 presidential campaign, and she recounts her experiences with various political campaigns as well as O'Malley's presidential campaign in her memoir "Any Given Tuesday."  Regarding O'Malley, she suggests in her book that O'Malley, running as a more liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton and as a Washington outsider, was caught up in his own Democratic insider status as a one-time mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland, and chair of the Democratic Governors Association and that his voters and donors overlapped with hers. "Minus a few policy differences," Smith writes, "there wasn't that much daylight between them." And so, Smith explains, this only made it easy for Bernie Sanders, who was more of an outsider than O'Malley, to become the anti-Hillary at O'Malley's expense, as there was only room for one anti-Hillary.

I agree with that assessment up to a point.  Stylistically, O'Malley resembled Hillary, and he did have notable political connections like she did (particularly in his home state), but he seemed to have more in common with Sanders on the issues, while Sanders was more direct and more flamboyant about his own differences with Hillary. But it was what Smith wrote about O'Malley's own style that raised my eyebrows.

"There was the O'Malley behind the scenes and off the record - warm, genuine, funny, and smart," Smith wrote.  "Then there was the O'Malley who appeared the second a TV camera or recorder turned on.  Guarded and stilted in his presentation, oddly formal in his language, he was like a mid-2010s candidate doing an impression of a 1990s-era B-list actor doing an impersonation of 1960s-era Kennedy - he just couldn't quite connect. He was branded with the I-word, the death knell for any politician - inauthentic."

Here Smith cuts to the crux of the onion ring.  I never paid much attention to O'Malley's ability to connect - I was more tuned in to what he said than how he said it - but looking back at his TV appearances, I see Smith's point.   O'Malley usually gave the same stump speech every time he made a campaign appearance and gave the same pat answers to questions every time he granted an interview.  The only thing different in each case was his audience - different audience, different state, same presentation.  I didn't see anything wrong with that; because he was speaking to different audiences at different times, people only heard the same O'Malley spiel once, not a dozen times like I did, as I followed every appearance he made.  And I, being a true believer in his campaign, never got tired of his spiel.  Heck, I loved it.  But unless you delve into a candidate's policy positions, like I did with O'Malley, you're inevitably going to look for warmth, spontaneity, and charm - the sort of things Barack Obama has in spades.  Or as one reporter told Smith while covering O'Malley, "I guess I just wanted or expected him to be more."

This is in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders.  Sanders is as warm and cuddly as a porcupine, but his worn-down suits, his unkempt hair, and his railings against corporate America satisfied those who wanted more.  He's authentic.  In the end, it was a bitter pill for O'Malley to swallow.  "What looks perfect on paper," Smith said of O'Malley, "doesn't always translate in real life."  

So all right, the Democrats are probably going to go down in flames on Tuesday, and we could be only two years away from Donald Trump becoming der Amerikanischer Führer if President Biden either loses his bid for a second term or doesn't run for re-election, with no obvious alternative Democratic presidential nominee.  O'Malley has the issues, he has the resumé, he has the chops, and he has the experience. Also, he has Katie.  But he needs the charm, the warm, the spontaneity, the charisma, the gosh darn authenticity to compete with Donald Trump in 2024 if Biden steps aside - and Trump is as authentic as hell (the same hell he'll put America through if he is President again).  But wait: O'Malley does have all that - the charm, the charisma and all that rot.  So if O'Malley runs again in 2024 - or in 2028, for that matter, assuming we still have presidential elections with more than one candidate by then - what should his handlers do?

Simple: Let O'Malley be O'Malley.

Let him be that guy Lis Smith knew personally.  Let him be the warm, smart funny guy you'd have a beer with.  Let him connect.  Let him let his hair down, as it were.  Let the real Martin Joseph O'Malley shine through.

And when he's President, then we get to eat our Pop-Tarts.

So what's my gambit to spur O'Malley to run again in 2024 if President Biden does not?  Never you mind! You'll find out soon enough.  

O'Malley Still Campaigning

Martin O'Malley is out of office but is not out of politics.  

He's thinking of running for President again? 

No.  But, while he didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, he did attend a Democratic county committee fundraiser a couple of weeks ago.

O'Malley and his wife Katie were guest speakers at a barbecue fundraiser in Cecil County, Maryland, in the northeastern corner of the state, along with U.S. Representative Anthony Brown, the Democratic nominee for Maryland Attorney General (not Katie!) to help local Democrats such as Phyllis Kilby, who is running to represent the Fourth District of . . . the Cecil County Council.

I kid you not.  All politics may be local, but the O'Malleys are going really local!

It seems to me that the O'Malleys are getting back to their roots, speaking at local political events that would only get coverage in weekly community papers (or Patch.com sites, as the case may be).  I have advocated for Martin O'Malley to make a comeback, but not on such a small stage.

Speaking of stages, Martin O'Malley doubled as the entertainment for the cookout.

This picture suggests a dismaying similarity to those since-forgotten singer-songwriters from the late eighties and early nineties who had a couple of hits and played Radio City Music Hall but are now relegated to playing suburban "coffeehouses" or "concert halls" that are actually rented church rectories where folks serve you Hydrox cookies (Hydrox, not Oreo) and apple juice.  And the refreshments are free with the price of admission.

Not exactly the look of a guy who might run for President again in 2024 or 2028, but then again, Paul McCartney would serendipitously play local pubs and university campuses all over Britain with Wings before working his way to American arenas in 1976.

Watch this guy.  And, watch this space.

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. 😉 😋

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. 

April 2015: The Month That Destroyed America

It was seven years ago this month, April 2015, that two seemingly unrelated events set the United States on a path to its eventual downfall . . . a place we haven't quite gotten to yet.

Why do you think Donald Trump became the 2016 Republican front-runner and was eventually elected President?  Because of his charm and charisma?  Because of his inspiring rhetoric?  Because of his fourteen points?  No, it was because he got help from his eventual Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton (below).  This is what she said in an e-mail about campaign strategy to the Democratic National Committee - written seven years ago this very day - that was later put out in October 2016 by WikiLeaks (admittedly, with a little help from their friends, their accomplices in the Kremlin):  

The variety of [GOP presidential] candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more "Pied Piper" candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party . . .. We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack.

The Pied Piper candidates were Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and another guy named . . . Donald Trump.  So, the Hillary campaign legitimized Donald Trump by focusing more on him than on a nice guy like Jeb Bush.  Really smart strategy, Hillary! 

Trump may by the type to lead rats out of town, but he can also lead lemmings to their deaths. 

Meanwhile, Martin O'Malley, the then-newly former governor of Maryland, was preparing to announce his 2016 presidential candidacy when suddenly Freddie Gray, a black man in Baltimore, where O'Malley had been mayor and had strengthened law enforcement tactics, was arrested for possessing a knife, which was perfectly legal.  He ended up being beaten in police custody and died, and even though O'Malley hadn't been mayor in eight years, the media and also David Simon - the creator of the Baltimore-set police TV drama "The Wire" - somehow blamed O'Malley for Gray's death.  This allowed a Washington press corps already skeptical of O'Malley and his viability as presidential candidate - the man was a protégé of the always laughable Gary Hart, for Pete's sakes! - to take him even less seriously than they already did.  Olivia Nuzzi's coverage of O'Malley's presidential campaign announcement - which focused on anti-O'Malley protestors at the event - was so satirically biting you could almost hear her snicker while you were reading it.  

Needless to say, the media's spin on Gray's death doomed O'Malley's chances to be  a serious contender against Hillary for the Democratic presidential nomination, transferring that role to Bernie Sanders - who could not win the Democratic presidential nomination as an independent, and the press knew it.  (That's why they didn't cover him; besides, they were too busy covering Trump.)  Add that all together, and you had the trajectory of a flawed nominee-in-waiting being crowned the Democratic presidential candidate to take on Trump, and you got . . .

Well, you got economic and environmental policy rollbacks that benefitted the rich, three right-wing Supreme Court justices, withdrawals from various international agreements, an out-of-control pandemic, and . . . January 6.

And all because Hillary - and thanks to her efforts, the press - wanted to elevate Donald Trump and no one wanted to elevate Martin O'Malley.

Hillary Clinton, though, remains the chief villain here.  She wanted Trump as an opponent, and she got more than she bargained for.  And the sooner these Hillbots stop worshipping her and start seeing her as the destructive force she is, the better. 😠