Martin O’Malley, Long-Shot Presidential Hopeful, Is A Real Climate Hawk

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) is nothing like any pop culture stereotype of a politician. He’s not a boyishly charming airhead like George W. Bush or The Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby, or a blunt, lovable grandpa like Joe Biden or The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet. He’s not even that much like the fictional politician based partly on him, The Wire’s Tommy Carcetti, who like O’Malley became the unlikely white mayor of majority-black Baltimore. O’Malley has none of Carcetti’s sleazy slickness. O’Malley comes across more like the sort of engaged administrator you would hire to turn around a moribund government agency.

In January, O’Malley will leave office after eight years because term limits prevented him from running for a third term. He will likely run for president in 2016, despite low name recognition and a lack of classic charisma. But whatever his seeming political deficits, he has won a steady stream of elections, made tangible progress in governing, and earned respect from progressives, including climate hawks.

When he walks in — no jacket, sleeves rolled up to his forearms — to the annual ClimateStat meeting at the Maryland State House in late October, where agency heads report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he amps up the dry proceedings with rapid-fire questions and his enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of policy. “That’s awesome! That’s a good use of GIS [geographic information system],” he exclaims over a map of tree coverage on the projector. (O’Malley likes data visualization; he later observes, “People under 40 communicate in charts and graphs.”)

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