“A C student can get this,” professor Martin O?Malley, freshman governor, assured a class of several dozen political science majors, faculty and university bigwigs as he rolled through a 50-minute lecture on his deficit-cutting tax package.

“I was a C student,” O?Malley told the group at the University Maryland, Baltimore County, library in Catonsville Wednesday, and while some say his plan “is complicated, it has a lot of moving parts,” he thinks most people understand it. Certainly, he told reporters afterward, “It?s not beyond the ability of the members of the General Assembly to understand and pass.”