Martin O'Malley Looks Forward

Martin O'Malley has all the makings of a 2020 presidential candidate.  When he tells the press that he "just might" run again in 2020, it sounds more like like a definite affirmation than a hedge-betting answer.

For proof that O'Malley means that he definitely will run for President again when he says he "just might," all you have to do is look at what he's doing now.

O'Malley is setting up a new political action committee (PAC) for Democratic candidates for state and local offices. The PAC, Win Back Your State, is meant to help Democrats running for state legislative, municipal and school board offices get elected, because such offices are where the Democrats need to rebuild if they have any chance of regaining one of both houses of Congress in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.  He's also doing this to subvert the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which continues to act aloof from the grass-roots elements of the party.  O'Malley has sent a message to local Democrats that they shouldn't bother looking for support from the party elites in their efforts to win lower offices.  Rather, they should just go out and compete for them, and he'll be there to help.  And not just with money; he plans to continue campaigning in person for whoever asks him for the favor.  It's the perfect way to get support from local Democrats for another presidential run.   

O'Malley is trying to buck up Democrats still reeling from and demoralized by Donald Trump's election to the Presidency.  O'Malley's efforts may seem obsessive, even maniacal; even his wife Katie thinks so.  "My wife said to me, 'Why do you keep going out there?' And I said, 'Because I feel like I’m doing something good for my country. You want me to sit at home and throw stuff at the television?'" he said in a recent interview.  "Life is all about how we transform our grief. There are a lot of Democrats who, for the last year, have been wallowing in grief. I, instead, decided to get out on the road and help really decent people who are running."

And in case you think he's crazy, former Vice President Joe Biden has started a similar PAC as well.

But O'Malley is doing even more.  Having visited Iowa and New Hampshire more than any other Democratic presidential hopeful in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, he has continued to visit those two states into 2017.   O'Malley is well-known in both states as a result of having campaigned aggressively for the Presidency at a time when the establishment was behind Hillary Clinton and insurgent Democrats moved to Bernie Sanders.  As Seth Masket explains in this must-read column at FiveThirtyEight.com, O'Malley set himself up in 2015 and 2016 for a second presidential run by spending a great deal of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he has since also positioned himself to play the long game in courting support among grass-roots Democrats for the party's presidential nomination while the party establishment is too rudderless to control the nomination process for 2020 as it did for 2016.  The DNC is not only rudderless, it's broke; the Republican National Committee has continued to raise and save more money than the DNC.  Is there anything the DNC has more of than the RNC?  Yes - debt, to the tune of $3.2 million.  And though the Republicans are driving up the debt in Congress, the RNC is debt-free with more money rolling in by the day.    

O'Malley is not taking the reality of Trump's Presidency in silence.  But he's not taking any guff from establishment Democrats, either; the DNC snubbed him once before, and now he's returning the contempt as he helps down-ballot Democratic candidates on his own.  That's not a way to get Democratic establishment support for a presidential candidacy (and who cares about them?), but it's a way to get the rest of the party to support you.   Katie O'Malley may think this is all quixotic now, but let's see what she thinks about it when she makes her debut as First Lady at the 2021 presidential inaugural balls.      

Green Down The Ballot

Commentator and gay activist Dan Savage is getting on my nerves these days.  Not only is he dismissing Green Party voters as pasty-faced straight white people who don't care about people of color and LGBT folks, he has implied that the Green Party has focused so much effort on running  Jill Stein for President that it doesn't focus at all on down-ballot races where any political party worth its salt would start to build itself up.  He has said that maybe the Greens should contest races for smaller elective offices before going for the White House.

Dan Savage is full of crap.  The truth of the matter is that the Greens are running several candidates for all sorts of offices this year in the United States.  Overall, the Greens are running 279 candidates - let me repeat that number: 279 - across the nation in 2016, but you probably didn't know that because, when the media do talk about a third party, they talk about the Libertarians and their standard bearer Gary Johnson's ignorance of Syrian geography.  And the Greens have been running candidates in lesser offices, concurrently with their presidential candidates, for years.

Here are some more numbers, directly from the Green Party itself, on how successful it's been in building itself up in the U.S. as an alternative to the Democrats:  The party has won 31 percent of all the elections it's contested, it's put 1,013 people into local office and gotten 57 mayors elected since 1987, and there are 140 Greens who, at this writing, hold elective office.  One Green who has held office is a woman who got elected twice as a member of the Town Meeting in Lexington, Massachusetts.  The woman's name?  Jill Stein. 

The Democrats, aided and abetted by elitist supporters such as Savage, want you to think that a true party of the people can never challenge them.  Well, Hillary has offended too many people who are looking for real change with her hawkish forging policy proposals, her coziness with Wall Street, and her arrogant attitude toward environmentalists, and some of us had enough of her and her party's centrist claptrap.  The polls suggest that the Democrats may revitalize themselves in the elections, but it won't change the fact that it is declining and rotting from within just as much as the Republicans are.  The two-party system is closer to the verge of collapse then it's ever been since the 1850s, and it's time for new voices and new ideas.

And someone please tell Dan Savage to stop bullying Green voters and focus more on his . . . anti-bullying campaign.

I, for one, plan to vote for as many Green Party candidates on my local ballot as I can.  Alas, I live in a very Republican precinct, so Jill Stein may be the only Green I can vote for. :-(