Baltimore Launched Martin O’Malley.

"Martin says he only lost by 43 votes, I say I beat him by 44. The fact is I won that election, but it seems to me he won the war because he's been successful ever since," says John Pica, the then-state senator that O'Malley challenged in the primary.

The two men ran a tight race, and O'Malley's candidacy was always a longshot one. His brothers and a high school classmate ran his campaign and they did their own opposition research. O'Malley claimed to have knocked on every door in the district.

But ultimately, he narrowly lost. The only person this surprised was O'Malley. He always thought he could win.

"So it was a hard loss, but in looking back now, it probably was the best thing that ever happened to me because it pointed me in a different direction," he said in an interview earlier this year.

Instead of the statehouse, O'Malley set his sights on a city council seat. Working at a law firm during the day, he made his case to Baltimore's voters at night. That race, O'Malley won. He went on to spend eight years on the Baltimore City Council before launching a campaign for mayor in 1999. He was the only white candidate of the three major contenders in a majority-black city. . .

"Fundamental to the turnaround of Baltimore and getting her headed in a better direction was that the people of our city decided that we would no longer tolerate the fact that we had let ourselves become the most violent city in America," he said.

Despite that, Cheatham says that O'Malley is a consummate politician, always punching his way toward the next rung on the political ladder. Baltimore was just another step on his path to the next level.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/aug/03/baltimore-launched-martin-omalley-then-weighed/