Mr. O'Malley's Dodge

ON THE ONE HAND, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley favors slot-machine gambling; on the other, he thinks the slot-machine proceeds are a "morally bankrupt" method of paying for public education. On the one hand, Mr. O'Malley supports putting slots at Maryland racetracks; on the other, he doesn't want the state to get hooked on the revenue they'd generate. More than anything, the mayor says of the most critical fiscal issue facing the state and its voters, he'd "sure like to get this issue behind us." He is, in the words of state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert), "a very pragmatic elected official." Which is to say that when it comes to slots, Mr. O'Malley seems to believe in nothing at all.

That's too bad, since at the moment Mr. O'Malley, a Democrat, is the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination for governor in 2006. At his current rate of hemming and hawing, he could set a new standard for equivocation before the campaign even begins. By contrast, his apparent rival for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, takes a forthright position on slots: He's against them -- period. "I reject the notion that the only way to move this state forward . . . is to addict more people to gambling," Mr. Duncan said.

Mr. O'Malley, the muscle-shirt-wearing lead singer of his own Celtic rock band, has matinee-idol looks, star quality inside his party and overwhelming public support in his home town. But the early line on his gubernatorial prospects is that when the going gets tough with Mr. Duncan, he may suffer from a gravitas gap. By swinging to and fro on slots, and supporting it mainly so it will go away, Mr. O'Malley lends credence to that critique and undercuts his claim to be his party's best hope of recapturing the governorship.