Why Martin O’Malley Could Be the Future of the Democratic Party
That’s the happy spin. But there are problems. Sure, it’s not great he has $800,000 in the bank, but, more important, there’s a battle being waged inside the man’s head: Is he a wonk or a man of the people? There are moments when he comes across as a human-head version of the FiveThirtyEight website. It’s only when he rolls up the sleeves and pulls out the six-string that you see the leader he could be. O’Malley concedes the point somewhere in a car going from Nowhere, New Hampshire, to Even More Nowhere, New Hampshire. “I’m gonna just let it rip,” he says, “and see what happens.”
On the stump, O’Malley breezes over his creation story not because he isn’t proud of it, but because it’s just so goddamned normal. There’s no absentee father in Kenya, no Hugh Rodham belittling his daughter. He’s the third child of Thomas, a World War II bombardier who went to college on the GI Bill before becoming a lawyer, and his now-87-year-old mother, Barbara, who still works as a receptionist for Sen. Mikulski. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, home of government bigwigs and scallywag lobbyists, just outside D.C.
O’Malley was his eighth-grade class president, but his athletic career was less successful. “I like to tell my son I mostly played ‘left out,’ ” he says with a smile on a train from New York to Baltimore later in the week. But as the waterways of Maryland pass by — many that O’Malley cleaned up as governor — he remembers his other less-publicly-varnished side. Martin’s father would take him down to the Eastern Shore, where he raced through the high grass and watched the cranes fly by. “Who’s the nerd with the binoculars?” he says of himself while showing off family photos on his iPad.
His parents instilled in him a Catholic sense of right and wrong and charity that his longtime friend and future chief of staff Michael Enright saw when they first met at a bus stop, where O’Malley was sharing his after-school snack with a homeless man. (OK, the guy already had his hand in the bag, but O’Malley let him munch away.) “Injustice still fires my engines,” O’Malley says. He went to Gonzaga College High School and then on to Catholic University, both in the District.
He wasn’t the greatest student. In his sophomore year, he began volunteering for a little-known presidential candidate named Gary Hart. O’Malley ended up taking a semester off to work on the campaign, and it changed his life.
