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.