Is Nick the Nitwit giving Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley advice about his TV attack ads? What’s with this business of excoriating former Gov. Robert Ehrlich for making $2.5 million?
If you haven’t seen this gem, consider yourself lucky. It goes along fine as an attack ad, talking about how Ehrlich voted against the minimum wage and how he’s supposedly in the hip pocket of big business. In other words, it’s the typical, despicable class warfare stuff for which Democrats are infamous.
The message is that Ehrlich isn’t “one of us,” not one of the common folks, not working class enough. Interestingly, it was Ehrlich, not then-Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who visited Baltimore’s Carver Vocational Technical High School during the gubernatorial race in 2002. The school is located in a poor, working class, black neighborhood. Come to think of it, I never heard of O’Malley visiting the school either, and he was mayor of the city for darn near eight years.
But I digress. Later in the ad, some supposedly “common person” says, “Ehrlich made $2.5 million working for a lobbying firm.” Then another “common person” adds for emphasis, in case we didn’t get it the first time, “two point five million dollars.”
So making money’s a crime now? Apparently it is, if you’re a Republican.
But when I was a Democrat, I wouldn’t have passed up the opportunity to honestly and legally make $2.5 million a year. (Yes, there is an interesting story about why I’m now a Republican. It involves O’Malley, his fellow Democrats in Baltimore when he was mayor, $58 million that went missing from the school system and the Democrats trying to make Ehrlich the bad guy.)
You read that right: The man who, as mayor of Baltimore, still hasn’t accounted for $58 million in taxpayers’ money has people putting out ads criticizing Ehrlich for making a piddling, in comparison, $2.5 million. Once again, Maryland’s Democrats have shown they have an overload of chutzpah, no cut card and no shame.
And no darned sense either, for those who’ve really evaluated the ad. O’Malley makes $150,000 a year as Maryland’s governor. If Ehrlich gets elected again, that’s the same salary he’ll make.
Now do the math: That’s a 94 percent pay cut. Ninety-four percent.
Even if Ehrlich were elected to two consecutive terms as governor, he’d still come up $1.3 million short of that $2.5 million he made. That would still be a 52 percent pay cut.
So Ehrlich, the ad really says, is willing to take a pay cut to serve the people of Maryland. That says something positive about Ehrlich, because I wouldn’t take a two-cent pay cut to serve the people of Maryland. I’m not sure I like Marylanders that much. Heck, I’m not sure I like some of my family members that much.
I’m sure some pro-O’Malley folks will accuse me of being pro-Ehrlich and claim this particular column is nothing more than an attack ad against O’Malley. I’ll put those charges to rest now: My vote is going to the candidate who commits to giving imprisoned former Baltimore Black Panther leader Marshall “Eddie” Conway a full pardon, so it looks like I’ll be voting for neither Ehrlich nor O’Malley.
(Conway has served 40 years for murdering a Baltimore police officer; he was convicted solely on jailhouse snitch testimony, which studies have subsequently shown is notoriously unreliable.)
I have no dog in this fight, but the question remains: Whom should Marylanders vote for? The guy willing to take a pay cut?
Or the one who still can’t account for $58 million?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
