# Martin O'Malley for President thread **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [May 31, 2015, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241 "2015-05-31T05:33:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Pashnish\_Ewing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8797f3/32.png) [@Pashnish\_Ewing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pashnish_Ewing)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2015, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/122 "2015-08-04T16:06:31Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Headline Seattle Times: “Rejection of Bush, his legacy clear in election” > > Ye coppeth many pleas. > > Perhaps the Seattle Times is published in “not normal English”. > > Maybe their editors took NNESOL, it is close to Canada. > > Maybe you could just admit to being unfamiliar with a standard rhetorical convention. That’s more of draw than a victory, though, right? The Seattle Times is saying ‘The rejection of GW Bush, _and the GW Bush Legacy_, was clear in this election’. Or am I reading it wrong? ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/123 "2015-08-07T19:30:57Z")
Please take any further discussion of political semantics to another thread. Thanks! O’Malley wants more than six debates with his Dem rivals: [http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/250372-omalley-dems-tilting-race-toward-hillary-clinton](http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/250372-omalley-dems-tilting-race-toward-hillary-clinton) ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/124 "2015-08-07T22:05:19Z")
Sanders too. Really, I think six debates is enough, but the DNC does seem to be protecting Clinton here. It’s almost as if they don’t want an Obama to interfere with the plan this time. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/125 "2015-08-07T22:07:13Z")
The irony is that Obama and his aides have often said that a long, hard-fought primary campaign in 2008 honed his skills and made him a better candidate for the general election. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/126 "2015-08-07T22:09:48Z")
That’s important for an inexperienced candidate. The Democrats are trying to deny O’Malley and Sanders that opportunity. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2015, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/127 "2015-08-09T04:23:39Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > Funny how he got large majorities of the black vote in both mayoral elections and both gubernatorial elections in which he ran. I don’t think it’s funny at all. Perhaps you would be unable to control your laughter while black youth from Park Heights to Belair-Edison are caged on Eager Street. As for his victories, perhaps it was due to techniques such as strategically placing signs that read simply “Vote for the Democrats” in the weed carpeted median strips of the pothole-ridden thoroughfares of troubled districts. > [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > An Oct. 2014 article on O’Malley’s declining support then among his fellow Marylanders: > > [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/as-omalleys-approval-rating-falls-md-voters-not-confident-in-his-presidential-bid/2014/10/11/e48aebd2-5096-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b\_story.html](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/as-omalleys-approval-rating-falls-md-voters-not-confident-in-his-presidential-bid/2014/10/11/e48aebd2-5096-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b_story.html) > > And see the last four paragraphs. Harrison Hickman. Doesn’t sound like a guy who’s been pounding the pavement outside Lexington Market. I’ll bet money right now omalley doesn’t crack 33% come primary. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2015, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/128 "2015-08-09T19:13:28Z")
Which primary? The Iowa caucuses? The New Hampshire primary? I may take that bet. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2015, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/129 "2015-08-12T21:03:42Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > Which primary? The Iowa caucuses? The New Hampshire primary? I may take that bet. Neither. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2015, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/130 "2015-08-15T03:42:16Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Neither. Which, then? An interesting Daily Beast piece on O’Malley: [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/06/you-have-martin-o-malley-all-wrong.html](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/06/you-have-martin-o-malley-all-wrong.html) ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2015, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/131 "2015-08-15T12:12:08Z")
Hey, **EH,** how about posting a few snippets, either quotes or summaries, that help illustrate your attraction to him, not just another link? This approach does not really help advance the Fight all that much. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2015, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/132 "2015-08-17T04:07:50Z")
:: shrugs :: Lots of Dopers post links. If I read something I think others might find interesting, so do I. You can click on a link and read a bit, if you like; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. I’m not into spoon-feeding. When I feel moved to comment, I will. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2015, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/133 "2015-08-17T12:43:00Z")
How about at least a hint about \*what \*you found interesting? ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2015, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/134 "2015-08-17T13:51:55Z")
It seems to be taking the position that the ends justified the means, and that black folk weren’t mad about O’Malley’s police force when they were making Baltimore livable again. > [@](#): > > In 1999, an audience member asked a question during a Baltimore mayoral debate that boiled down to this: “Why should we stay here?” It was a reasonable ask. The city was a mess. The urban renaissance that had begun to bring cities like New York and Los Angeles back to life had passed Baltimore by. Baltimore was the most violent city in America. There was only one single public school grade where most of the students were proficient in reading or math. Blocks and blocks were run-down and empty. > > \ > > Not that anyone paid much attention to what O’Malley said. He stood almost no chance of winning, a white politician in a city that was majority African-American and that had proudly elected its first black mayor in Schmoke. Yet by promising to no longer ignore the spiking crime rate and to bring opportunity back to neighborhoods long neglected, O’Malley swept into office, beating his two opponents in even the city’s most violent and poverty-stricken neighborhoods. > > \ > > From 2000 to 2010, the incidence of crime in Baltimore dropped 43 percent, outpacing by a stretch the 11 percent drop that the nation saw during that period. The crime rate dropped by 40 percent. Graduation rates rose. Median home prices doubled. A new biotech park was built on the city’s east side. A new performing arts center was built on the west side. O’Malley was obsessed with numbers and metrics, and set up a 311 call center to track citizen complaints. A program called Project 5000 enlisted volunteer attorneys to help deal with the city’s massive vacant home problem as titles to those homes was eventually transferred to individuals and nonprofits for redevelopment. The school system was pulled back from the fiscal brink. CitiStat, designed to track crime, helped bring the crime rate down and created a budget surplus of $54 million that was then reinvested in schools and programs for children. At last, the population stabilized. It was no longer necessary to flee, if you could. The number of college-educated 25-to-34-year-olds living within three miles of downtown Baltimore increased 92 percent in the 10 years after O’Malley became mayor, fourth among the nation’s 51st-largest metro areas. > > \ > > To be sure, change was both too fast and too slow. The blight and poverty remained. And although crime dropped, O’Malley’s zero tolerance policing policy created a backlash in the very communities it was designed to protect. But those policies were not as unpopular as the rioting now in the streets of Baltimore would suggest. > > “I don’t recall O’Malley stating that he would do something about ‘black crime,’ just crime,” wrote liberal Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodericks toward the end of O’Malley’s time in City Hall. “Coming out of the long, dreary Schmoke years, Baltimoreans appreciated O’Malley’s almost singular focus, along with millions in increased funding dedicated to drug treatment for the city’s thousands of addicts who contribute, directly and indirectly, to 80 percent of crime.” > > “He was trying to stop the crime on the streets. People were getting killed daily on Old York Road and in Park Heights,” Robert Nowlin, a Baltimore community activist, told The Daily Beast. “He did something a lot of these mayors don’t do: He walked with the small people. A lot of these mayors stay in the affluent areas. He walked the streets.” Something tells me the _Daily Beast_ would not be making the same excuses for Giuliani or other mayors who took on crime using tough tactics. Beyond that, it seems to me that most of these policing strategies never worked. Stop-and-frisk primarily wastes police resources on searching unarmed black men. CRASH primarily wasted Los Angeles’ money on settling lawsuits. How much did whatever O’Malley was doing improve things over and above the general downturn in crime of the late 1990s? ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2015, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/135 "2015-08-18T12:10:43Z")
Well, something worked, because a four times greater reduction in crime than the national average happens for a reason. That is what you’d call statistically significant. What would help is for government officials who actually cared about educating voters about the reality of government to explain things to their constituents. The government is not a scalpel, it’s a sledgehammer. If you want to reduce crime, you’re going to have collateral damage. You have to choose between the collateral damage of gang violence and the collateral damage of tough policing tactics. Voters in crime ridden areas seem to want what can’t ever exist: a police force that is tough on criminals with precision, while serving the innocent with a smile. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2015, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/136 "2015-08-18T13:25:00Z")
Baltimore had a lot more crime to begin with, so you’d expect to see a more dramatic reduction. Anyway, besides increasing access to drug treatment, it doesn’t look like O’Malley did much differently than Giuliani, whose policing methods were lauded at the time but now appear to have been statistically insignificant. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2015, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/137 "2015-08-18T13:27:25Z")
Then why didn’t that crime drop occur in the 90s under O’Malley’s predecessor? NYC also had a more significant crime drop than the country as a whole under Giuliani. So something made crime drop at higher rates under specific administrations where it failed to drop as significantly under others. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2015, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/138 "2015-08-19T02:10:11Z")
Crime decreased in Baltimore for the same reason it decreased elsewhere, mass incarceration. The economic, academic, and political subjugation of Baltimoreans increased during Omalley’s reign. O’Malley supporter you have 'splainin to do on many fronts, but one I see you shying away from is the education issue. Would you send your kids to Baltimore schools after a decade of Marty Boy? I’d rather send them to William Jennings Bryan for Biology, or Alabama. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2015, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/139 "2015-09-07T00:36:16Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > O’Malley seems to have a Romney-like problem though. He’s running to Clinton’s left but he’s never been all that liberal: > > [http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/martin-omalley/bs-md-rodricks-0531-20150530-column.html](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/martin-omalley/bs-md-rodricks-0531-20150530-column.html) The stage in that photo is awfully white. > [@Richard\_Parker](#): > > There is scant evidence that O’Malley’s police policies accomplished anything other than needless harassment and abuse of Baltimore’s black population while gaming the crime stats. He even went back to the previous mayor’s term and reclassified crimes from misdemeanors to felonies so he could show a bigger drop in the crime stats. > > O’Malley waged the drug war as aggressively as anyone else, with all of the predictable consequences of declaring war on your citizens–not least of all frayed police-community relations, police seeing citizens as the enemy, and all the use of force tactics that the drug war brought with it. On top of the typical drug war bullshit of stop-and-frisk, trivial car stops, no-knock raids, civil asset forfeiture, and all the rest, O’Malley’s unique twist was to add tactics of mass arrests without probable cause (ultimately found to be unconstitutional, naturally). If you don’t think illegally rounding up hundreds of citizens every night so you can show voters you’re tough on crime will breed resentment and problem in police-community relations, you’re crazy. > > Those policies and the violence they lead to are, more than anything else, the \*casus belli \*of the black lives matter movement. This stuff is going to matter in 2016. Oh, he’s a _bigot._ At least, a mix of desperate and reckless with his constituents given power. Worrying sign. > [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > According to David Simon, [they didn’t reduce crime. They just fudged the numbers.](http://davidsimon.com/the-bad-math/) > > The only crime statistic you can trust is the murder rate, because you can’t hide the bodies. Any thing else can just be discarded as “unfounded” or filed as a lesser charge. > > In the same link, he has an on-record quote from the police commissioner hired by O’Malley saying that it is acceptable to consider reports of a shooting as “unfounded”, despite the fact that there are victims with bullet wounds. > > And all this with falling arrest numbers. Because, of course, most of the arrests weren’t documented either. As long as you don’t count civil rights violations committed by the police as crime, I guess it’s fairly rosy. And he had the police lie about assault statistics? OK, not wasting any more time on this one, I guess. Pity. Well, who else we got? ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2015, 12:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/140 "2015-09-07T00:55:38Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > Yup. O’Malley is the most credible of the declared Democratic candidates other than Clinton, unless Biden gets in. If Clinton can’t seal the deal, he stands to be the most likely alternative. I don’t see a path to the nomination for someone who embodies what’s wrong with “moderate” white Democrats. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Parker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/35a633/32.png) [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2015, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241/141 "2015-09-07T01:07:14Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Oh, he’s a _bigot._ At least, a mix of desperate and reckless with his constituents given power. Worrying sign. I don’t think he’s a bigot, or at least no more than Bill Clinton is (or Charles Ramsay or Leonard Hamm). He is insensitive to the consequences of bad policing and willing to play with people’s lives for political gain. Or, at least he was. Whether he has changed or not is another question. I look forward to seeing if he even _claims_ to have changed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/martin-omalley-for-president-thread/721241.md?page=8)