Voters may be frustrated, angry and ready for change, as the candidates say, or that may just be psychological projection. The three Democratic Senate candidates were clearly irritated and hoping their media fortunes would change as they protested outside the League of Women Voters office in Annapolis Wednesday and at the Maryland Public TV studios in Owings Mills Thursday evening.
Allan Lichtman, Josh Rales and Dennis Rasmussen vented their frustration, but it was as much about their general lack of coverage in the media as their exclusion from Thursday?s televised debate.
After the sidewalk protest, the candidates followed reporters into the league?s modest offices. League President Lu Pierson was cornered by a bank of cameras, microphones and angry candidates asking hostile questions. Rales compared them to “the Supreme Soviet.” If they could do the same at the offices of newspaper editors and broadcast news directors, they probably would.
A Headache Named Schaefer
“This is where I took my dates in ninth grade,” Gov. Robert Ehrlich recalled on the sidewalk outside Sorrento?s pizza shop in Arbutus. That was after a stop at the pool hall down the street. “A class act,” Ehrlich smiled.
Later he told a small crowd of business people and supporters, “I just came from the Board of Public Works and I have a headache.” Ehrlich didn?t elaborate, but the headache was named Schaefer, who blocked the governor?s attempt to move the state Planning Department out of Baltimore.
Schaefer opponent Peter Franchot makes much of William Donald?s support for Ehrlich, and vice versa, but on the board, the irascible Schaefer has actually voted against Ehrlich administration plans hundreds of times and frequently abstains as well.
Political Red Robes
Ehrlich likes to remind his base that “there is another equal branch of government called the courts.”
That equal branch had its say last week, weighing in against early voting and the placing of Tom Perez?s name on the ballot. While arrayed in red robes with quaint white stocks, and sitting in a dark wood-paneled chamber, the judges are no strangers to politics. Six of the seven were appointed by Democratic governors, and at least two had distinctly political careers.
The attorneys handling the two cases had their own political baggage. Stephen Abrams, arguing the case against Perez, is a Montgomery County school board member running for comptroller ? though this case seemed more important to him than his campaign. “I?m a 63-year-old rookie in this court,” the roly-poly Abrams told the red robes, but he was quick on his feet, ably parrying the question the judges like to toss out.
The opposing attorneys in the early voting case are the poster children for perils of challenges to sitting judges. Al Figinski, who argued against the early voting, was a Baltimore City judge in the 1980s, but got defeatedin election to the office. Deputy attorney general Donna Hill Staton, who argued for the early voting, had been a Howard County Circuit Court judge in the 1990s before she lost the election.
The other political shoe waiting to drop from the Court of the Appeals is their decision on the sacking of the Public Service Commission appointed by Ehrlich. The judges heard the case in early July.
Len Lazarick is the chief of The Examiner Statehouse bureau. He can be reached at [email protected]
