If you asked an SEC football fan to handicap Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s odds of winning his party’s presidential nod and a general election in 2016, they’d probably say there’s a better chance of Kentucky winning a national title.
That’s not stopping him from testing the waters, though, and he is a plausible Hillary-alternative next to Brian Schweitzer.
O’Malley’s making the usual campaign-in-waiting rounds – courting donors, raising money for the party, and campaigning for candidates in states vital to both the present 2014 cycle and beyond.
Issue-wise, he’s looking to woo folks on the left with remarks on the present crisis at the border, in which the Terrapin State’s chief executive sought daylight between himself and the White House.
“We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death,” quipped O’Malley last week.
Now the other shoe’s dropped. He doesn’t want us to turn them away, so long as they’re kept out of Maryland.
According to a CNN report, the wannabe all-things-to-all-progressives governor privately requested the White House not “send these kids to Western Maryland,” where a Westminster Army Reserve Center is being considered for conversion into housing for undocumented children at the border.
What’s more ridiculous about the whole thing is that the call in which O’Malley expressed the anywhere but my state sentiment to White House policy aide Cecilia Munoz was sparked in response to his “certain death” rhetoric.
Talk about coming full circle. Obama didn’t even have to use his pen to get a different tune; all it took was the phone.
It gets worse. He tried to further explain away his comments by asserting that part of Maryland is far too conservative for undocumented children to be sent there. So, he’s throwing his own constituents under the bus, lest his reputation with the national rank and file of his own party take a hit.
The entire episode goes to show that O’Malley, at this point at least, is most interested in hacking off liberal talking points in hopes of gaining traction with someone, anyone, pining for an alternative to Clinton.
The considerable disagreement I have with his policies aside, O’Malley could’ve seized the moment and been a left-wing counterweight to the calm resolve shown by Texas Governor Rick Perry last week, which elevated him in the eyes of many.
There are similarities – each are outgoing governors, each gearing up for the possibility of a national campaign. They stop there.
Perry led on an issue which he’s had to deal with, not just talk about, for years. O’Malley apparently balked at the first sign of consequences for his policy prescriptions. Seems he’s more interested in tailoring a national profile for a primary audience.
Unless something changes, the episode could end as a bruising introduction to the national policy stage for O’Malley, rather than the point at which he tied issue chops to setting a campaign infrastructure into motion.
O’Malley’s brand of saber rattling, devoid of leadership or consideration of the consequences, may stir the pot in a progressive-laden Democratic primary. It doesn’t, however, a real leader make, nor does it offer serious dialogue about our present crisis.
Brandon Howell is an account director at Hynes Communications and a contributor to the Peach State political blog Georgia Tipsheet. Follow him on Twitter @BrandonDHowell.