A Politician Molded by Irish Rebels, Jesuit Ideals

A stint as a legislative fellow in Mikulski's office in the late 1980s inspired him to run for public office, he says. After a few years as a prosecutor and a narrow loss in a state Senate race, he won a seat on the council in 1991.

He concedes he had trouble holding his tongue in those years. When a renowned British army band scheduled a Baltimore performance, O'Malley decried it as "appalling and galling" to Irish Americans. When he was angry at Democratic council member Robert W. Curran (his wife's Uncle Bob) for not siding with him on votes, he sent Curran a scathing letter.

It might have been written by candlelight with a quill pen: "You have several times begged for pardon and communication only to return to the brothel of unprincipled and corrupt men."

Baltimore's big concern was high crime: drugs and murder. O'Malley pushed for zero-tolerance policing, involving strict enforcement of laws against loitering, public drinking and other nuisance offenses. The goal was to curb serious crime by improving the quality of life in the city. Inevitably, the brunt of the crackdown would fall on poor neighborhoods.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke (D) and his police commissioner opposed the approach, which has been used in other cities. Not until O'Malley became mayor was he able to put the idea to work. Now it's a campaign issue for Ehrlich, who accuses O'Malley of sanctioning "mass arrests" of innocent black men.

With his family growing, O'Malley says, he almost quit elective politics in 1999, to make real money practicing law. Instead, he jumped into the mayor's race -- a long-shot, white candidate in a mostly African American city -- and shocked the establishment by winning big.

His two main opponents in the Democratic primary were African American: City Council President Lawrence A. Bell III and former council member Carl Stokes. O'Malley was accused of cynical opportunism, of hoping for a split black vote that would allow him to grab the nomination. But it didn't work out that way.

"I don't think Martin ever thought he was going to be just the candidate of the white vote," Wilson says. He adds: O'Malley "could sense that the city had reached a tipping point on crime, that that's what mattered to people, black and white."

Making public safety the centerpiece of his campaign, he got 53 percent of the primary vote, while Bell and Stokes came away with 45 percent combined.

In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, O'Malley easily won the general election. After winning reelection two years ago with 88 percent of the vote, he was immediately anointed a contender in the 2006 governor's race.

And here he is, six days out, hoping his ascent continues.

He made plenty of waves in his first term as mayor, shook up the bureaucracy, shot off his mouth, started a couple of feuds, angered a bunch of people. He calls it "a fearlessness about declaring goals that some might think are overly ambitious, and actually demanding that people who work for us figure out how to achieve them."

His second term has been quieter. "The mutinies were put down," he says. "We're far from perfect, but we're making progress."

Faith and persistence, O'Malley says. Consider Hugh O'Neill, the leader he admires most in Irish history, a 16th-century chieftain who fought a stubborn war of resistance against the English hundreds of years before the Republic of Ireland was at last born.

O'Malley wrote a paean to him and sang it with the band. Now, cruising along Interstate 95 in the SUV, the campaign day not yet over, he is reminded of the lyrics.

"But to those who would say such struggle was folly . . . one man backed his dreams up with action."

He smiles.

"Great stuff, huh?"