Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Gov. Bob Ehrlich wrestled in their first debate over who is better equipped to drive Maryland’s economy out of a recession.
The hour-long debate, which was peppered with eye-rolls and personal jabs, was recorded in Baltimore’s WJZ-TV television studio Monday morning and shown across the state in the evening.
Ehrlich kicked off the debate by characterizing O’Malley’s administration as “hostile” to the private sector.
“What this election is really about is how we view small businesses,” Ehrlich said. “Small businesses are the backbone of our state. … We need a healthy private sector.”
O’Malley touted 33,000 new jobs created since January and blamed the struggles of Maryland’s small businesses on the national recession. He said his policies have fostered an economy friendly to innovation and venture capital projects.
Responding to Ehrlich’s charges of stifling job creation and business, O’Malley said, “Anger and frustration isn’t going to move us forward.”
He called Ehrlich’s pledge not to raise taxes an “irresponsible blanket pledge” and criticized the Republican’s plan to partially pay for the cut by not adopting the Geographic Cost of Education Index, which allocates more state money to counties where education is more expensive, such as Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
Ehrlich shot back that the index is not a state mandate.
“We will always have pretty good schools,” Ehrlich said. “We are a pretty wealthy state.”
He charged that O’Malley has ignored low-income students.
“Your color, your ethnicity, your race, what you look like should not be a predicator of the education you receive,” Ehrlich said, markedly appealing to one of O’Malley’s strongest voter bases.
O’Malley defended his record and boasted about a four-year tuition freeze that he said enabled more low-income students to attend college.
On other topics, Ehrlich pushed to relax gun control laws and bashed Casa of Maryland — a Hispanic advocacy group — as a safe harbor for illegal aliens.
“Why should we pretend laws don’t count?” he asked.
O’Malley admitted he partially agreed with Ehrlich — that federal immigration laws need to be reformed. But states should leave that to the federal government, he said.
He fingered Ehrlich for taking shots at illegals.
“We should not blame new Americans for problems our country is going through right now,” he said.
