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A Politician Molded by Irish Rebels, Jesuit Ideals
"People always overestimate my ambition and underestimate my conviction," the Democratic candidate for governor says.
(By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"To say that Baltimore could become the safest city in America -- if I am sincere in holding that ambition in my heart," he says, "and people rally around that ambition, and over 20 or 30 years it became true, then it wasn't all that foolish to begin with, was it?"
He wants to be governor, he says, because Maryland needs a leader who can inspire hope and encourage dreams. In Annapolis, he would stand for "the politics that says we are all in this together, that our tomorrows can be better than our todays."
Ehrlich has scoffed at the mayor's rhetorical flights. "I don't know what all that means, I gotta tell you," he said in a recent TV debate, after O'Malley waxed about "the politics of hope and the politics of dreams."
It was the Irish in him.
With help from Costello, now Gonzaga's vice president for development, O'Malley learned to play tin whistle and guitar in school. With two of Costello's friends, they formed a Celtic band, Shannon Tide, and hit the Irish pub circuit.
This was long before O'Malley became a Baltimore celebrity in the 1990s, a City Council member and the muscle-shirted frontman of the Celtic band O'Malley's March. The group formed in 1987 and went on indefinite hiatus when the governor's race heated up.
O'Malley says, "You can't very well tell the Wicomico Democrats you can't make their annual dinner because you have a gig at the Avalon with the band."
A Talent for Connecting
After working for a year at Gary Hart's Capitol Hill campaign headquarters, O'Malley, a Catholic University student, went into the field and gained a reputation as a superb organizer in the 1984 presidential race. He says he was drawn to Hart because the Colorado senator was more forward-thinking than the other contenders.
"He was talking about new things that all of us accept as true now," O'Malley says, meaning the advent of a global economy and the importance of technology.
Hitting the ground in Iowa in late 1983, a month before the caucuses, "was really Martin's release into freedom," says Doug Wilson, Hart's deputy campaign manager. He says O'Malley's talent for "connecting with people" came alive.
Hart laughs, recalling: "Every kitchen and living room I walked into, they were talking about Martin. The ladies particularly were praising this young fellow -- what a wonderful young man he was, how much they loved having him in their homes. He was playing his penny whistle for them, playing his guitar, singing."
With Hart competitive in the race until the end, O'Malley took on bigger jobs in other states and wound up a 21-year-old floor leader at the convention in July.
