Robert Ehrlich wears his heart and emotions on his sleeves, right down to the rubber bracelets on his wrists. And we like it, particularly when he turns up the heat on the near-criminal blundering of the administration of education of Baltimore City’s schools. The orange band on one wrist says “I am Able,” a personal reminder. The blue one shows support for Tay-Sachs disease research.
Sometimes that willingness to show his stripes and his emotion hurts the Republican as in his penchant to combat the Democratic-controlled state legislature — something he refuses to moderate if elected to a second term. In fact, he physically bristles when asked if he will change his style. And his performance in the recent televised debates shows that he takes Democratic Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley’s standard political obfuscations perhaps too personally. President Ronald Reagan’s self-deprecating humor would be a good guide for him.
But the fact that he is willing to stand up to the legislature and fight the good fight to check their excesses and blunders — for the sake of common sense and beleaguered taxpayers — is also his greatest strength. His veto of the “Wal-Mart” bill is a case in point. The vast majority of people in the state and the country without health insurance work for small businesses — not the target of the law. The legislature’s decision to override, forcing companies with 10,000 or more employees in the state, targeted at Wal-Mart, to pay at least 8 percent of their payroll toward health benefits was pure political grandstanding that would have meant one thing — fewer jobs if a federal judge had not overturned it.
And his ability to resurrect the Inter-County Connector and drive it toward approval speaks well of his long-range planning ability and determination and zeal on behalf of an important cause. The ICC would link Interstates 270 and 95 north of Washington, thus providing a desperately needed east-west link for Montgomery and Prince George’s commuters. The ICC will also be the first major road built in Maryland in decades.
Ehrlich’s support for charter schools, liberalized teacher certification and merit pay for teachers in hard-to-recruit disciplines shows he understands the types of structural reforms needed to improve ailing public schools across the state. O’Malley’s proposed reforms, including offering selective incentives to quality teachers and administrators, means only a few schools at best will have a means to succeed. O’Malley’s support for the Baltimore City union contract ensures HBO’s “The Wire” will be able to continue filming horror stories about city public schools.
On taxes, both candidates have a mixed record. The free-market Cato Institute gave Ehrlich a “C” in its bi-annual report on governors for hiking property taxes and imposing a $2.50 per month “flush tax” to pay to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. But O’Malley raised the local income tax 20 percent, doubled the recordation tax, created an energy tax on nonprofits and residents and raised water and sewer rates. O’Malley said he won’t rule out raising taxes down the road if elected. Ehrlich has said he would not raise taxes if elected to a second term, and his record fighting income and sales tax increases suggests he means what he says.
So does his unabashed support for slots, which would reverse a hemorrhage of revenue to neighboring states. O’Malley has said he is in favor of a limited number of slots, but passing legislation to allow it is clearly not a priority for him.
O’Malley deserves some credit for his leadership in halving the city’s population loss rate and helping to spur development beyond the Inner Harbor, something no other mayor has been able to accomplish. He has also started the innovative and nationally recognized CitiStat program that monitors city departments to ensure they are serving the needs of city residents and not wasting taxpayer money.
But his failure to lead substantial reform of the city school system and the nagging violent crime here makes us think he’s not ready to lead the state yet. But the biggest reason O’Malley should not go to Annapolis is that it would mean a return to the machine-style politics of one-party rule that has dominated the state for decades.
More compelling than the reasons for voting against O’Malley is the fact that reelecting Ehrlich means debate, not decree, will guide our state. Let’s return Gov. Ehrlich to Annapolis and Mayor O’Malley to city hall.
