Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Monday, July 15, 2002

Hitting the ground running, the energetic 39-year-old O'Malley beefed up the police department and, with a signature no-nonsense brand of leadership, eliminated 10 of the city's most dangerous open-air drug markets in his first six months, followed by 20 more during his second year as mayor.

Along the way, Baltimore has earned a No. 1 ranking among major cities in reducing violent crime – down by 23 percent over the last two years. In the second half of 2000, Baltimore had the biggest reduction in murders among America's 20 largest cities – down 33 percent.

By October 2001, the country sat up and noticed this volatile new presence – and for more than aggressive crime fighting. NBC News reported, "Since Sept. 11, Mayor O'Malley has dedicated himself to transforming this historic Eastern Seaboard community of 600,000 [40 miles north of Washington and 200 miles south of New York City] into a symbol of security and emergency planning for the 21st century.

"In the past four weeks, he's gone to Capitol Hill, linked more than 200 mayor's offices across the country via the Internet and spent about $1.5 million from his city's budget, all to make one point – security must now be the top local priority in America too."

The Baltimore Sun was in lockstep, proclaiming, "O'Malley is America's new anti-terrorism mayor," an accolade tinged with irony. The screen adapters of author and Maryland resident Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" picked Baltimore to get nuked by terrorists in his fiction thriller "The Sum of All Fears."

Making Headlines

In addition to being America's anti-terrorism mayor, O'Malley enjoys another moniker from his campaign days. To some he will always be the "White Man" in the infamous Washington Post headline of Sept. 15, 1999: "White Man Gets Mayoral Nomination in Baltimore."

Normally careful to scrub away any gratuitous racial verbiage, editors at the Post could not resist the "man-bites-dog" aspect of Caucasian O'Malley's stunning victory, winning 53 percent of the vote in a city with a Democratic primary electorate that is 63 percent black.

Amazingly, he won all six of Baltimore's city council districts, demolishing a 17-candidate field.

The Post's prescient analysis of the race was that "the candidate who could cobble together the broadest biracial and cross-generational coalition will emerge the winner."

With the aid of embarrassing skeletons emerging from the closets of a couple of the front-runners, O'Malley did the requisite cobbling, going on to be elected the youngest mayor in Baltimore's history, with an overwhelming 91 percent of the vote. Prior to his election as mayor, O'Malley served on the Baltimore City Council, from 1991 to 1999.

O'Mally's latest notoriety came with his announcement at the last minute that he would not oppose Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in her bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Although O'Malley said his decision was a wrenching one, with his duty being to continue his troubled city's cleanup, pundits pointed out that the unlikelihood of prevailing against a Kennedy in a Democratic primary contest is perhaps what really kept him from throwing his hat in the ring.

Additionally, Townsend, the daughter of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had already amassed a war chest of more than $6 million for her gubernatorial bid and held a lead over the mayor in polls.

This bump in the road, however, has done nothing to stall O'Malley's momentum. Building on his solid reputation as one of the nation's stellar mayors, O'Malley can now continue to embellish his record for another two years, with future statehouse and national ambitions intact.

After making his decision not to run, O'Malley announced, "There is no tougher fight, and no more noble cause, than the turnaround of a great American city."

Waging the Fight

Waging that tough fight is something O'Malley excels at, even beyond the critical crime fighting. Baltimore is coming off of its second consecutive year of positive job growth – 8,400 new jobs from July 2000 to July 2001 – following a decade of job loss.

Additionally, under the O'Malley regime there has been:

• The establishment of the Mayor's Office of Minority Business Development to help broker connections between minority entrepreneurs and the city and the larger business community;

• The creation of the Mayor's Office of Economic and Neighborhood Development, headed by a deputy mayor;

• The launch of "Project 5000," a partnership to acquire 5,000 vacant and abandoned houses citywide and make them available for private investment by the end of 2003;

• The hiring of a technology advocate to ensure that Baltimore is able to compete with other cities nationwide for technology talent and companies;

• A 33 percent pay raise for the Baltimore City Police Department, the largest in the force's history.

To track all his accomplishments and keep people informed, O'Malley posts his administration's performance on the Web for all to see. "Strategies are developed and employed, managers are held accountable, and results are measured – not just quarterly or at budget time, but every two weeks," says O'Malley.

And the energetic mayor's strategies reach right down to the streets and gutters. Total trash collection in the city has increased 46 percent. Illegal dumping now prompts a 911 high priority. "Hope needs a clean environment," O'Malley preaches.

All this energy sometimes erupts in a fit of classic Irish temper.

Last January O'Malley lashed out at Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy for dropping charges against a city police officer accused of official misstatements and of planting evidence on a criminal defendant. The balking chief prosecutor claimed that someone had broken into a secure evidence locker and compromised evidence critical to the case.

Welfare Reform

In addition to crime reduction, terror preparedness and economic development, O'Malley likes to point out the strides his city has made in welfare reform.

In a recent appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee, he spoke in his capacity as chairman of the Conference of Mayors Task Force on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Reauthorization.

"As of last year, since the passage of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, 150,589 clients left the welfare rolls. There were 77,298 welfare recipients in Maryland compared to 227,887 in 1995," he informed Congress.

However, the bad news, said O'Malley, is that reforms have resulted in a welfare system that is increasingly concentrated in America's cities. "In my own state of Maryland, since 1995 Baltimore has gone from representing 43 percent of the state's welfare caseload to 63 percent – even as the number of cases in our city dropped by more than half."

When not barking at errant prosecutors or agency heads, the 39-year-old hail-fellow-well-met O'Malley likes to perform with his Irish Rock group, O'Malley's March.

Meanwhile, O'Malley's wife, the mother of his four children and a veteran prosecutor – and newly appointed judge – has no problem in calling things as they are.

Last January, when a state judicial ethics panel decided that being the spouse of the sitting mayor made it improper for her to hear at least two-thirds of the docket, she summarily announced, "He's the mayor, I'm a judge. It's apples and oranges. He's the last person I'd ask advice of or be influenced by. I'm not involved in how city government runs. This is not Hillary and Bill."

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Homeland/Civil Defense

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