SAN FRANCISCO — Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley wants to remind you that he’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
It’s understandable if you’ve forgotten.
Since launching his campaign May 30, O’Malley has stumped hard in Iowa but hasn’t made much headway in the polls or fundraising. He’s still polling just slightly ahead of fellow “forgotten Democrats” Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, as front-runner Hillary Clinton grapples with email woes, socialist Bernie Sanders rides a populist surge, and Vice President Joe Biden flirts with running for the top job.
Sanders’ “Feel the Bern” momentum and Donald Trump’s blustery, blazing rise are two sides of the same coin, O’Malley, 52, said in an interview with this newspaper Thursday after he took part in a civic technology panel discussion in San Francisco.
“This is a summer of a lot of anger and a lot of fear and a lot of division across the electorate, but anger and fear never built a great country,” he said, adding that he continues “to gain traction with every visit I make” to Iowa, where the nation’s first presidential caucuses for the 2016 election will be held in January.
O’Malley has visited 28 of the Hawkeye State’s 99 counties and polled as high as 7 percent, he noted, “and once the debates start to happen … people will — for the first time, in many instances — hear of me.”
With the first of six Democratic debates scheduled for Oct. 13 in Las Vegas, O’Malley needs to stay afloat until then. He has tried to turn up the heat lately: He stopped in Las Vegas to hold a news conference Wednesday outside the Trump International Hotel, where he blasted Trump’s anti-union rhetoric and labor practices.
O’Malley, who spent after eight years each as Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland’s governor, often is tagged as an earnestly liberal technocrat with data-driven policies who is not a compelling orator or a particularly affable candidate. As of June 30, his campaign had raised only about $2 million and the super PAC backing him had raised less than $300,000.
“O’Malley has no name recognition, no money, and the only time recently he’s gotten any kind of media coverage was during the problems in Baltimore,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a University of Southern California political expert.
She was referring to the riots that wracked the city in the spring after African-American resident Freddie Gray died in police custody; six officers later were charged with assault, involuntary manslaughter or second-degree murder. Some critics said the zero-tolerance policing policies that O’Malley had enacted as mayor were partly to blame for Gray’s death.
“So if there is anyone who can recall Martin O’Malley, it’s more likely that it’s in a negative way than a positive way, rightly or wrongly,” Jeffe said.
But O’Malley on Thursday defended his record, arguing that he strengthened police-community relations and enacted new accountability practices. The violence, he said, was a symptom of deeper societal problems.
“These police incidents are like the match to a puddle of kerosene of anger and desperation — and the sense of being excluded and unneeded is actually a lot broader and deeper now than it was even before the recession,” he said. “It’s the seething anger beneath the surface of an economy that’s no longer working for us. … The entrenched poverty, the entrenched structural unemployment in the heart of American cities is creating the conditions where extreme violence is even more likely to erupt today than before.”
The concentration of wealth and power among a scant few has left the nation with only two paths forward, he said. “One is a sensible rebalancing for the sake of the common good we share, and the other is pitchforks and stones. Those are the conditions we create when we turn our economy upside down and forget that the economy is people and not money.”
O’Malley, a big advocate of collecting, analyzing and reporting data to improve government, hosted a contest Wednesday night in San Francisco at which eight tech entrepreneurs pitched a panel of judges with their plans for boosting civic engagement. The event doubled as a fundraiser, with supporters paying as much as $1,000 each.
On Thursday morning, he took part in a panel of civic tech executives — including Wednesday night’s winner — at Brigade, a nonpartisan startup aimed at increasing political engagement and working toward common goals. There, O’Malley talked about restoring an economy in which hardworking Americans earn wages that let them afford the products and services their work creates. He also spoke about boosting science, technology, engineering and math education curricula and making college more affordable to ensure a skilled, prepared workforce. Maryland, he noted, has the highest ratio of high school students taking and passing advanced placement classes in STEM fields.
Unlike the Republican presidential contenders, this year’s Democratic candidates have shied away from directly attacking each other, and O’Malley again declined to discuss Clinton’s emails with reporters Thursday.
“I think you guys know what the legitimate questions are, and I think she and her lawyers are capable of answering them,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re the most important questions in terms of what will move our country forward.”
During the one-on-one interview, O’Malley said Black Lives Matter activists who have disrupted presidential campaign events recently are making a “critically important point.”
“Whether we like it or not, we have to admit that we all share the legacy of a very brutal racist past, and there is no issue in which that racial legacy is more painfully intertwined than the issues of violent crime and public safety in our country,” he said. “The point that is being made is that in our country there’s no such thing as a spare American, that black lives matter, and we all need to do better in delivering equal justice under the law and protecting the dignity of each individual life.”
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.