Until Saturday morning, Martin O'Malley was a centrist Democrat who made his bones as a tough-on-crime Baltimore mayor and as a competent Maryland governor who led from behind on issues that would have marked him as liberal before he saw any political advantage to it.
Now, in offering to "rebuild the American dream," he offers a rebuilt O'Malley, in full embrace of a populist and progressive agenda as way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton in a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
I think that makes him a former Clinton Democrat.
The O'Malley who announced his candidacy Saturday on Federal Hill was not the blah, cautious technocrat who served two terms in Annapolis. With pops of fiery rhetoric about the corrupt excesses of Wall Street, the stagnant wages of American workers, income inequality and entrenched poverty, O'Malley sounded at times like a New Deal, union-hall liberal, sleeves rolled up, ready for a fight.
People who call O'Malley a liberal have missed both the highlights and the nuances of his record, going back to when he was mayor. He was elected on anti-crime promises that law-and-order Republicans admired. He pushed a zero-tolerance law enforcement strategy like the one executed by New York City police while Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, was mayor there. Starting in the early 2000s, Baltimore police made thousands of arrests for "quality of life" offenses; many of the charges were later dropped by prosecutors.
Though violent crime fell in the city, as it did across the country generally, Baltimore taxpayers had to pay $870,000 to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of men who had been arrested for dubious reasons during the O'Malley years. The city agreed to officially reject zero tolerance, a stunning repudiation of the mass arrest strategy.
O'Malley's response? He said the lawsuit had been brought by "ideologues of the left."
