Former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich attacked Gov. Martin O’Malley’s record on police enforcement and education funding, trying to take away support from the Democrat’s most loyal base during a testy Thursday morning debate dominated by minority issues.
In the homestretch of the campaign — early voting begins Friday — the duo butted heads for the third time in 10 days, this time on Baltimore’s WOLB-AM radio station, which serves a mostly black audience. Overwhelming support among black voters has helped O’Malley pad his lead over the former governor, polls show.
But Ehrlich, during the hourlong debate, said O’Malley’s zero-tolerance, imprisonment policy as mayor of Baltimore led to “mass arrests, creating criminal records for people who have done nothing more than walking down the street.”
O’Malley countered that the measure was necessary to combat “open-air drug markets” that had proliferated in the “most addicted, most violent, most abandoned city in America.”
Each touted their history of minority appointments and business outreach, as well as tough stances on gang violence.
However, O’Malley highlighted Ehrlich’s failing grades from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In turn, Ehrlich accused O’Malley of “taking advantage of the fact that it’s an African-American audience.”
Trying to distinguish himself from the Republican brand, the former governor cited his dozens of appearances on former state Sen. Larry Young’s radio show — a tactic he said would be “counterintuitive for some Republican candidates.”
Nearly one in three Maryland residents is black, twice the national average.
In 2008, President Obama attracted nearly 200,000 more blacks to Maryland’s polls than in 2004. Obama won 62 percent of the state’s vote, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.
O’Malley repeatedly aligned himself with Obama’s marquee policies, criticizing Ehrlich for not supporting the president’s overhaul of health care or stimulus spending.
“The former governor never misses an opportunity to criticize President Obama for taking action to save us from going into the second Great Depression,” he said.
Ehrlich said the health care law would create a “Canadian-European” style system and limit the scope of treatment, particularly for elderly citizens.
The more aggressive of the two candidates, O’Malley berated Ehrlich for slashing school spending and behaving like a lobbyist during his time away from political office.
“It’s OK to get a job in the private sector; you’re going to be looking for one in a couple of months,” Ehrlich quipped, prompting the most audience laughter during the debate.
