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For the journalist, see Martin O'Malley (journalist). Martin Joseph O'Malley (born January 18, 1963) is an American Democratic politician from Maryland, who has served as Mayor of Baltimore City since 1999. He is currently the Democratic nominee for Governor of Maryland in the 2006 elections.
Political development In December of 1982, O'Malley, while still in college, signed on with the Gary Hart for President campaign. In late 1983, O'Malley volunteered to go to Iowa. He phone-banked, organized volunteers, and even played guitar and sang at small fundraisers and other events. Hart was the surprising runner-up in the caucus, and O'Malley headed to other states such as Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. Initially polling at 1%, Hart rose to become the biggest challenger to Walter Mondale. Hart became the “new ideas” candidate, but eventually lost the nomination. Returning to Maryland in 1984, O'Malley finished college at The Catholic University of America in 1985. Later that year he enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, earning his JD in 1988 and passing the bar that same year. In 1986, while in law school, O'Malley was named by then-Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski as her state field director for her successful primary and general election campaigns for the U.S. Senate. Later he served as a legislative fellow in Senator Mikulski’s office from 1987-1988. In 1987, O'Malley was arrested by the Montgomery County, Maryland, police and charged with drunk driving. Court records show the charge was dismissed by a judge. The character questionnaire part of the application O'Malley filed with the Maryland Board of Bar Examiners in 1988 required O'Malley to disclose under penalties of perjury his 1987 arrest for drunk driving . (In October 2006, during O'Malley's campaign for the office of Governor of Maryland, the 1987 drunk driving arrest became public for the first time when it was reported by the Baltimore Sun newspaper. O'Malley was then asked if he had disclosed the arrest to the bar examiners on his character questionnaire. O'Malley said that he did not remember, and he refused to authorize release to the public of a copy of his bar application.) In 1988, he began dating his future wife, who happened to be the daughter of the State's Attorney General. Later that year, O’Malley was hired as an Assistant State's Attorney for the City of Baltimore. He would hold that position until 1990. In 1990, O'Malley ran for the Maryland State Senate in District 43. He lost the Democratic Primary to incumbent John A. Pica Jr.. Although he was winning by five votes on the morning after Election Day, the subsequent absentee ballot count handed the election to his opponent by just 44 votes. A year later he ran for a vacant Baltimore City Council seat to represent the 3rd District and was elected for the first time to political office. He served from 1991 to 1999. As Councilman, he served as Chairman of the Legislative Investigations Committee and Chairman of the Taxation and Finance Committee. – Mayor of Baltimore City O'Malley announced his campaign for Mayor of Baltimore in 1999. He won the Democratic Primary with over 50% of the vote. He was then elected Mayor of Baltimore in the General election with 91% of the vote. In 2004, O'Malley was re-elected in the general election with 88% of the vote. In O'Malley's first year in office, he adopted a statistics-based tracking system first used by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and called it CitiStat. O'Malley expanded its use across all government services and linked it with a personnel performance rating system to grade the performance of government employees. O’Malley and CitiStat won the "Innovations in Government" award from Harvard University. As one of O’Malley’s top five accomplishments, his administration “cut property taxes to new 30 year low” which is ironic considering "he sought and won an income tax increase which was enacted in 2001".* O'Malley made public safety the foundation of his campaign for Mayor and it continues to be listed as his number one priority on his web site *. During his first Mayoral campaign, O’Malley’s most prominent campaign promise was to bring down Baltimore’s murder count to 175. O'Malley claims that Baltimore “has brought about nearly a 40% reduction in violent crime, which leads the nation” *. Baltimore remains however, a dangerous city. Baltimore’s murder rate continues to be five times that of New York City, which has the lowest crime rate of America's large cities. To the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Unified Crime Reports for 2000 and 2003, violent crimes -- which include murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault -- in Baltimore (that were reported to law enforcement officials) declined from 16,003 in 2000 (O'Malley's first year in office) to 13,789 in 2003. Many cite the decrease in crime as a decrease in reporting of crime. There were 261 murders in Baltimore in 2000; 256 in 2001; 253 in 2002; and 270 in 2003, and has increased to 276 murders in 2004. * However, the crime statistics from Baltimore are under serious review. The FBI crime reports come directly from the Baltimore City Police Department. Members of the Democratic controlled Baltimore City Council as well as the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun newspapers have questioned the crime statistics released by the O'Malley administration since they differ with official FBI crime reports. They claim that crime in Baltimore is seriously underreported. **. O'Malley lauds many of his achievements in the Baltimore City School system, stating that his administration has greatly improved schools and that they “are on the mend for the first time in decades.” As one of his five most prominent achievements, O'Malley claims that his administration “improved student test scores across the board.” However, a national study on the graduation rates in the nation's 50 biggest cities found Baltimore to be second to last (with Detroit in last place). This is a longstanding trend that O'Malley is fighting to overcome. This past May, Baltimore paid a consultant $500,000 to produce a slogan for the city: "Get in on it." * The O'Malley administration, meanwhile, has been criticized for not increasing funding for city schools operations more rapidly.*. National Prominence In 2002, Esquire Magazine named O’Malley “The Best Young Mayor in the Country,” and in 2005, Time Magazine named him one of America’s “Top 5 Big City Mayors” *. In August of 2005, Business Week Magazine Online named O'Malley as one of five "New Faces" in the Democratic Party. Business Week said O'Malley "has become the party's go-to guy on protecting the homeland. The telegenic mayor has developed a detailed plan for rail and port safety and has been an outspoken critic of White House security priorities" *. Homeland Security In 2003, national Democratic leaders asked him to give the Democratic Response to the President’s weekly radio address in which he spoke about Homeland Security. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry invited O'Malley to speak on the topic in Wisconsin. In 2004, O'Malley was one of the featured speakers at the Democratic National Convention in the FleetCenter in Boston, Massachusetts. In his speech, he focused on Homeland Security stating “Sadly and unforgivably almost three years after that fateful day when thousands of moms and dads, sons and daughters didn’t come from work on September 11th, America’s cities and towns, America’s ports and borders and America’s heartland remain needlessly vulnerable” *. As the only mayor to speak at the Democratic National Convention, O'Malley proved that he was a “rising star” in the Democratic Party. In August 2005, O'Malley was invited to speak to the National Press Club to give a mayoral perspective on homeland security issues. Again he criticized the Bush Administration, stating, "In Washington today, the traditional strong defense values of the party of Abraham Lincoln are found only in the words carved on the cold walls of his memorial." O'Malley also stated that increased Homeland Security funding supported the "values of our republic – what former Senator Gary Hart would call 'the Fourth Power' – the moral exponent of our military, economic, and diplomatic powers" *. Family O'Malley is married to Catherine Curran O'Malley (Katie). He first met her in 1986 while he was working on now-U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski’s primary and general election campaign and she was working on her father J. Joseph Curran, Jr.’s campaign for Attorney General of Maryland. In 1988, they began to date and he married her in 1990 while he was running his first (and unsuccessful) campaign for political office. In 1991, they had their first child, Grace, while Katie was finishing her last semester of law school at the evening school of the University of Baltimore. They live in Northeast Baltimore City with their children, Grace, Tara, William, and Jack. The children attend St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church. O'Malley’s father in law J. Joseph Curran, Jr. is the longest serving attorney general in Maryland history, serving since 1987. He is also a former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, member of the Maryland House of Delegates, and a state Senator. In 2001, Katie, an attorney with an undergraduate degree from Towson State University and law degree from the University of Baltimore, was appointed by Democratic Governor Parris Glendening (D) as District Court Judge of Baltimore City. One of O'Malley's brothers, Peter C. O'Malley is considered one of the Mayor's top political advisors. Peter married his wife, Melinda, in 2003. She was hired in November 2002 by J. Joseph Curran, Jr. in the office of the Maryland Attorney General. She was assigned to work in the office of the Maryland Insurance Administration under former Commissioner Steven B. Larsen and Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich. Relations Due to a possible inherent conflict of interest in potentially having two close family members at the position of Governor and Attorney General, some have suggested that Curran should step down from his post. Curran decided not to seek reelection on May 7, 2006, citing his age and having accomplished a great deal rather than his relation to O'Malley. The potential conflict of interest was recently cited when environmentalist groups initiated a class action lawsuit against the George W. Bush administration concerning mercury pollution rules. Republican Ehrlich blocked attorney general Curran and the entire state of Maryland from joining the dozens of states in a law suit against the Bush administration's decision to exempt power plants from mercury emission controls. Curran’s son-in-law O’Malley then joined the suit on behalf of the City of Baltimore to protect the environment and the Chesapeake Bay. He was met with criticism from Republicans for not focusing on Baltimore’s needs *. Moreover, many point to the fact that O'Malley failed to protect the environment and the Chesapeake Bay when he had the chance. He refused to revitalize the city's sewage system. He only did so when he was forced by a federal lawsuit, brought about by the Bush Administration, to revamp Baltimore’s aged sewer lines that were dumping effluent into the harbor. To pay for it, O'Malley added a 5 percent surcharge to sewer and water bills. When the Governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, proactively sought to upgrade the sewage treatment plants for the state of Maryland, the state added a surcharge to sewer and water bills. The O'Malley administration hypocritically derided this surcharge as a "Flush Tax". 2006 Gubernatorial Elections For more information, see Maryland gubernatorial election, 2006. O'Malley is the Democratic Party's candidate challenging current Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich in Novenber, 2006 elections. O'Malley featured the news article “Running early, running hard" http://www.gazette.net/200525/weekend/a_section/282041-1.html) on his new web site, launched June 2005. It states, “O'Malley has yet to officially announce his run for governor, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy on the campaign trail.” O'Malley named Jonathan Epstein as his campaign manager, but then fired Epstein in May 2006. O'Malley selected Anthony G. Brown, Delegate from Prince George's County, lawyer, and Iraq War veteran, as his running mate. O'Malley was expected to face Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan in the Democratic primary. However, Duncan dropped out of the race on June 22, 2006, citing health reasons, making it almost certain that O'Malley will be the Democratic candidate opposing Ehrlich in the general election. Friends of O'Malley also have speculated that he could be a presidential candidate in 2012 if he becomes governor (scary, ain't it?)*). O'Malley has come under some criticism from his opponents over the use of recent negative campaign ads. http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/9789267/detail.html. Sources | ||||||||
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