Twenty years ago, Martin O’Malley was an up-and-coming law student when then-candidate Barbara Mikulski chose the Montgomery County native to be the field director for a campaign that would ultimately result in Maryland’s first female Democrat in the U.S. Senate.
“He was in it because he was very idealistic,” Mikulski said last week during a phone interview. “He wasn’t going to law school to join a big firm. He wanted to fight for justice. He was a fighter. He wanted to stand up for the little guy.”
Now, O’Malley is a 15-year veteran with two terms as a Baltimore City councilman and nearly two terms as mayor of Baltimore on his resume. He has also shed his status as a political protege and grown into a leader whom others turn to for advice and guidance.
“More than any other individual, Martin O’Malley is the reason I became the mayor of Denver,” John Hickenlooper said as he campaigned for O’Malley on Friday morning in Bethesda. “He’s changed what it meant to be a mayor.”
And, now, O’Malley appears to be set on changing what it means to be governor of Maryland. Recent polls have him leading incumbent Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich by anywhere from three to 10 percentage points.
Supporters such as Mikulski say O’Malley’s bid to be Maryland’s next governor is only the next step in a career of righting wrongs and bringing new solutions and qualified people together to solve problems.
Detractors such as Ehrlich say O’Malley promised more improvements in Baltimore’s crime and education crises than he could ultimately deliver.
O’Malley has repeatedly shrugged off such criticism as the “politics of division and fear.”
“There is more that unites us than divides us,” has been O’Malley’s rallying cry.
The first of six sons born to an Irish-Catholic family, O’Malley spent his early years living in the Montgomery County communities of Bethesda and Rockville.
He graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington and then attended Catholic University of America, taking time off to work on Gary Hart’s presidential bid. After graduation, he earned his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore.
O’Malley first met the woman who would become his wife, Catherine “Katie” Curran, as he worked on Mikulski’s campaign and Curran worked on the Maryland attorney general campaign of her father, J. Joseph Curran Jr. The two married several years later and are now the parents of four — Grace, Tara, William and Jack.
Mikulski said she kept in touch with O’Malley, exchanging phone calls and sharing meals at Baltimore’s diners, in the years after the campaign that put her into the Senate. She said watched him go from a prosecutor in the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s office to a seat on the City Council. And then, in 1999, O’Malley told her he was going for the mayor’s seat.
“I felt he again would bring that idealism that sense of initiative to try new things, find new perspectives,” Mikulski said. “Baltimore was changing and we needed new solutions to old problems.”
As mayor, O’Malley took on issues of port security and proper funding for the city’s safety after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He also turned his attention to turning around the city’s flailing, failing schools. He sought to push the number of homicides to below 175 a year instead of the 300-plus yearly rate of killings he inherited, although homicides have not dipped below 250 a year since he took office in 2000.
Becoming mayor also opened O’Malley and his family up to a rumor mill that churned tales of extramarital affairs that resulted in Ehrlich dismissing a staffer for posting such claims on a Web site. Jared Denhard, a musician in O’Malley’s March, said it was hard to see bandleader O’Malley undergo attacks.
“It’s bizarre,” said the Columbia resident, who played celtic harp, trombone and bagpipes when the band performed regularly. “He’s like the straightest choirboy, a polite and responsible guy.”
O’Malley’s work in reviving Baltimore caught the attention of several national publications. It also led a Denver entrepreneur considering a run for mayor in that city to visit Baltimore several years ago.
“Everything had been getting worse,” said Hickenlooper of Baltimore, “and he stopped that. He got people to believe that the city would succeed.”
Hickenlooper said he liked O’Malley’s fresh view and innovative solutions to such problems as crime, education and growing a Baltimore prepared to compete in a global, not regional, economy. Hickenlooper ran, won and closed Denver’s worst budget gap ever without resorting to slashing staff or services. In April 2005, Time magazine named both Hickenlooper and O’Malley in a top five list of the best big-city mayors, with Hickenlooper coming in at third and his mentor in the fourth-place spot.
“It drives him nuts,” Hickenlooper said.
But Hickenlooper doesn’t expect to see O’Malley on such lists for much longer.
“The way he looks at the world is so fresh and so insightful,” Hickenlooper said, “that I wouldn’t be surprised that if, five years from now, they do the five best governors and he’s one of them.”
