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. 😊