Martin O'Malley warms up in Iowa for possible Democratic run in 2016 - Your thoughts?

Last edited Sun Jul 13, 2014, 10:49 PM - Edit history (1)

I really like O'Malley, he's not the most charismatic person on the planet, but he is a solid progressive. I won't vote for Hillary, this game of hide and seek she's playing is getting on my nerves. You know she's made up her mind. I think Elizabeth Warren is awesome, but somehow I don't think she'll get the nomination. We should be concentrating on the mid-terms, but this article was food for thought. What do all you think?
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Mark Z Baraback
Reporting from Des Moines
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The visit had all the trappings of a full-fledged presidential campaign: a speech at the state Democratic convention, a pep talk to door-knocking volunteers, breakfast with labor leaders, appearances alongside the party's candidate for governor. The only thing absent was a formal announcement by Martin O'Malley that he was, in fact, seeking the White House in 2016. But unlike a certain other much-chronicled, vastly better-known prospect, Maryland's two-term governor makes it no secret that, if not officially running for president, he is at least actively striding in that direction.

Hope drives belief. Belief drives action. And action achieves results.
- Martin O'Malley

Fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton says she hasn't decided whether to run, and neither, O'Malley says, has he. In the meantime, he is running one of the most vigorous noncampaign campaigns of any 2016 possibility in either party — raising money, stumping in early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, traveling abroad to boost his foreign policy credentials and honing a message that might be characterized, for brevity's sake, as compassionate competence.

"People want problem-solvers," O'Malley, a former Baltimore mayor, said in a late-night interview after the first of two well-received speeches to Democratic activists in Des Moines. "They want leaders that will bring people together to solve problems, not people that will take their ideology and try to beat round pegs into square holes."

Noted for his data-driven approach to policy, starting when he used computer analysis to chart citizen complaints and fuel millions of dollars of new efficiencies in city government, O'Malley is a devout Roman Catholic grounded in the Jesuit emphasis on social justice. His religious faith, he suggests, informs his secular beliefs.Noted for his data-driven approach to policy, starting when he used computer analysis to chart citizen complaints and fuel millions of dollars of new efficiencies in city government, O'Malley is a devout Roman Catholic grounded in the Jesuit emphasis on social justice. His religious faith, he suggests, informs his secular beliefs. "The numbers aren't abstractions," he said of his reverence for statistics. "The numbers are very real human beings and individual stories."

Like many native to the information age, O'Malley is fluent in the language of entrepreneurship, multiplatforms and changing technologies. His numbers-crunching success fighting crime, cleaning Chesapeake Bay and shaping up Maryland's bureaucracy could be a model for the federal government, he says, though it may be a challenge translating that into a resonant rallying cry: At times O'Malley can sound like a walking PowerPoint slide, holding forth on "silos of human endeavor" and "a cadence of accountability."

His record is one to make liberals swoon, even if he prefers the less-freighted "progressive" label.

Read more:http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-martin-omalley-president-2016-20140713-story.html