In that light, a long essay written by Len Lazarick in August for the October issue of What’s Up? Annapolis and What’s Up? Eastern Shore magazines holds up pretty well. These men have so much in common in their backgrounds, but are so different in philosophy. What led them to this grudge match? Was their anger a product of their clashing ambitions or something more personal?
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I'll vote for O'Malley because of this. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteTo a great extent, it seems, the animosity arises from how Ehrlich treated O’Malley and the beleaguered city he was trying to govern. Right out of the box, Ehrlich grabbed Baltimore Police Commissioner Ed Norris, who seemed to be making progress on the crime O’Malley obsessed about, and made Norris head of the state police. During his tenure, Ehrlich was constantly carping about city crime and city schools, and finally championed the takeover of 11 city schools by the state, a move O’Malley vociferously opposed and Democratic allies blocked in the legislature. There were other slights from Ehrlich that Democratic chief executives complained about as well (Baltimore County’s Jim Smith and Howard County’s Jim Robey among them), calls to the governor not returned, key decisions made without consultation. Ehrlich, on the other hand, saw himself as a victim of a partisan mugging, typified by his Rodney Dangerfield-like State of the State address complaining that he got no respect.
But Maryland governors and Baltimore mayors have long had an uneasy relationship, whether the mayor was named William Donald Schaefer or Kurt Schmoke and the governor was named Harry Hughes or Schaefer.
But you couldn’t get much more personal than the persistent 2005 rumors about the O’Malleys’ marital life, rumors that their kids heard at school, rumors so dogged that Mayor O’Malley and his wife, the district court judge, had to confront them head-on in public. While the gossip spread hither and yon from many sources— who never seemed to have any firsthand knowledge other than a friend of a friend — it turned out that a low-level aide in the Ehrlich administration had helped fan the wildfire. The aide, Joe Steffen, was eventually fired, and candidates who had run against Ehrlich in the past described similar incidents of underground personal attacks that they believed Ehrlich had to be aware of.