Oh Martin O’Malley.. The answer to the DEM that never was in 2016 or 2020, 2024…. – PB/TK
“None Of It Made Sense”: Martin O’Malley’s Long Year After Running For President – Ruby Cramer March 11, 2017
Martin O’Malley remembers running for president like this: He is on a train, heading for a bridge. He can see the bridge is giving out. He is shouting and waving and pointing at a “better lane,” he says. “But it’s like I couldn’t get anybody on the train to listen.”
“It was the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had in politics.”
O’Malley was still a young mayor in Baltimore, elected at 36, when he started hearing people say he might one day “go all the way.” Now, at 54, on the other side of that dream, he is at turns resigned to and not yet at peace with the eight months he spent as a candidate for the Democratic nomination. That his 2016 campaign never caught fire, or even much of a spark, is a reality he reasons with in one moment, ticking off outside contributing factors, before adding in the next that, in fact, “None of it made sense.”
“I couldn’t not try,” he says in a recent interview over two rounds of Guinness and plantain chips at a Cuban restaurant in Baltimore, the city where he launched his career. “But at the same time it was very frustrating,” he adds. “Really, really frustrating.”
“Thank God I picked the right high office to have that experience.”
It was around this time four years ago that O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, began erecting the “framework” for his presidential bid. And now, like then, he is filling his calendar with party work, helping candidates in special elections (two in Iowa, one in Delaware), and headlining local fundraisers and events (most recently, last weekend, in Iowa). And now, like then, he is toying with the idea of a campaign. (“As for the question of whether I might run for president again in 2020, I just might,” he told NBC News.)
But this is not the O’Malley who ran headlong into 2016. More than a year after his dismal finish in Iowa, securing less than 1% in the caucuses against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he still carries the frustration of a campaign spent trying and failing to find an “option to open up the lane.” He has a new distaste for the party establishment (“Washington gobbledygook”). And even as he supports local Democrats, trying to carve out his own role as the party centers itself around President Trump, he is without a clear next move for the first time in years.
Continue to buzzfeed.com article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/martin-omalley-on-2016?utm_term=.vlLpELJJR#.vcnDkgdde
