2 August 2004
Patricia A. Maloney
Mayor Coulda Woulda: Urban concerns back-burnered at DNC '04
Last month’s affable Democratic convention featured something for almost everyone, including Republicans and undecided voters. The miniscule coverage granted by the broadcast networks featured a parade of past presidents, retired flag officers, and hopeful candidates and their families. With little time to attract a broad national audience, convention planners scheduled the most general, high-concept speakers. In a departure from past convention coverage, where viewers could see a little of everything, the networks provided stingy samplers of policy and sound bites. To get the genuine flavor of the gathering, viewers had to look past traditional media for news and insight. Anyone seeing the network coverage of the convention might be forgiven for thinking that Democrats pay virtually no attention to civil rights, union issues, choice, and urban challenges.
Among the buffet items served to convention viewers watching C-SPAN in early prime time were speeches by party stalwarts, newcomers, and others whose involvement with the party merited some kind of payback. One highly-touted speech—not deemed important enough to go on after 9 PM, though—was delivered by Martin O'Malley, the first-term mayor of Baltimore, on the topic of homeland security and first responders.
O'Malley is one of the party’s presumed rising stars. Since his election as mayor in 2001, he has become visible for his attempts to clean up crime in Baltimore, his outspoken comments on the lack of actual Federal support for urban first responders, and for his future aspirations. In 2002, he publicly considered a primary run for the governor’s office against Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then lieutenant governor. O'Malley decided to focus on his new job as mayor, and Kennedy Townsend went on to run a spectacularly inept campaign that cost Democrats the governor’s mansion for the first time in many terms.
O'Malley is well-liked by many in the DNC. He, alone among mayors, has been chosen to give the Democratic response to President’s Bush’s weekly radio address, a big deal in Washington. He has constructed himself as a man of Baltimore City, taken potshots at his Maryland neighbors and political colleagues, despite the fact that he was born and raised in Montgomery County. And he is positioning himself to run for governor in the Democratic primary, against the well-financed and well-focused county executive, Douglas Duncan, who himself is a former mayor. O'Malley is attractive, articulate, relatively young, and even has his own band—O'Malley’s March. In other words, he was a perfect icon to speak for the cities in Boston last week.
O'Malley knows his topic, and the issue of homeland security—a chilling phrase uttered at neither convention four years ago—is a sensitive one for urban mayors, particularly Democrats who have seen promised first-responder funds held up in Republican-controlled state capitals. For his speech Wednesday night, the Maryland delegation was primed for his appearance, many of them wearing O'Malley T-shirts. O'Malley had spent the earlier part of the day doing interviews, including a live show on WAMU-FM in Washington, where he sneered at Montgomery County (his home) and its leader for being “suburban,” despite the fact that the county is far closer to the homeland security worries of the nation’s capital than is Baltimore. Both party leaders, and the small but very achievement-oriented state delegation, had their eye on the boy wonder mayor and his speech.
And then along came Jesse Jackson.
O'Malley was scheduled to speak after the Rev. Jackson, whose brief address roused the audience and left them shouting, and his words were covered live by the networks. By the time O'Malley got to the podium, only C-SPAN, the Maryland delegation, and the local media were watching closely, which is probably fortunate.
O'Malley's speech was brief but painful. Rather than appearing confident, he spoke in a stilted fashion, like a minor player in a 1930s drawing-room comedy. A sound problem kept him from being heard through the Fleet Center. His subject was good—although the 2004 DNC platform gives only two paragraphs to urban first responder concerns—but the delivery was wanting. If the DNC wanted a forceful speaker on homeland security, there are plenty of mayors who would oblige, and do so effortlessly and without the inside baseball attending O'Malley’s star turn.
Timing is everything in politics, and this time it was not to be for the Mayor of Baltimore. In the small and contentious world of Maryland politics, O'Malley’s speech was not the star turn it needed to be. Among the delegates watching him closely was his probable rival, who had a brief comment for the press. “He was great,” said Doug Duncan.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.