Backroom Deals
Now that issue, like slots, is synonymous with bickering, showdowns, stalemates. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Remember that hopeful spring day nearly three years ago in Arbutus?
The son of a car salesman and a legal secretary stood on the stoop of his boyhood row house in the working-class Baltimore suburb to announce his candidacy. He presented himself as fiscally conservative but moderate on social issues -- and able to work with Democrats.
As a stormy legislative session nears its end in Maryland, the political football called malpractice reform is hurtling toward Gov. Robert Ehrlich.
(Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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Standing on the humble stoop that day, Ehrlich said: "I have overcome a lot of obstacles in my life. I've been the underdog before."
Many of his old legislative friends hail from the freshman class of 1987, and like Ehrlich were assigned to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee. They recall an era of camaraderie that now seems like an impossible fable.
"We had jokes it was difficult to tell who was Republican and who was Democrat," says D. Bruce Poole, a conservative Democrat from Hagerstown who became majority leader but lost his seat to a Republican six years ago. "Bob was a backroom guy. We'd go in the backroom and work until midnight to get a piece of legislation that made sense and could pass muster."
Now everything is different. The partisan edge is much sharper, Democrats and Republicans agree, though they blame each other for the change.
"Everything has become more tied to the D.C. weathervane, whereas it used to be tied to the good-old-boy network," says Poole, who remains close to both Ehrlich and Busch, another committee freshman from the class of 1987.
Watching his old Republican friend dig in on issues, Poole disagrees with fellow Democrats who charge the governor with mere partisan gamesmanship.
"His reaction has been so strong, I come to the conclusion it's beyond politics," says Poole. "If you talk to Bob, there's no question he views Maryland as marching through a long course of just increasing taxation and regulation. I think he sees himself as having a historical role in changing that, and reversing course."
Poole remembers a summer in the late 1980s when they shared a beach house in Rehoboth. Busch was a regular visitor. Ehrlich was reading William Manchester's 1988 biography of Winston Churchill, "The Last Lion: Alone," about Churchill's wilderness years between the world wars, when he was out of favor with the dominant political establishment.
"If you dig deep into the psyche of Bob," says Poole, "his long history has been to be a maverick and to be an underdog and often to take a course that is different."
'They're Not Bad People'
It's almost midnight at the special session. The doctors in white coats look as though their patient is terminal. It will be another 3 1/2 hours before the Democrats pass what the governor has essentially pre-vetoed.
Ehrlich is not going to stick around. He's going to bed.
He steps across the street from the State House to the governor's mansion. Outside the wrought-iron gates, he pauses to reach out to the people one more time, through the lens of television camera. The Princeton football ring on his right ring finger catches the camera light.
First he speaks as the underdog, foiled by the powerful 2-to-1 Democrats: "I thought they were in my corner 48 hours ago. . . . 'Trust but verify' needs to be what we do."
He switches to Guv mode ever so briefly: "They're not bad people. They just have a different point of view."
Then he starts throwing elbows: "And that point of view has held sway in this town for decades, and they are just having a difficult time understanding there's another point of view up on the second floor of this [state] house. And that the Ehrlich-Steele administration does not simply buy into the status quo politics of have a problem, pass a tax. Have a new program, pass a tax. If it breathes, pass a tax. If it moves, pass a tax."
What's the point?
"We have our jobs. Our jobs are to lead. We will continue to lead. . . . We will get the job done."
With that the Republican walks up the path to a much grander front stoop than the one in Arbutus. He strides into the governor's mansion, and the big wooden door closes behind him.
