2016 Postmortem

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(85,996 posts) Tue Jul 14, 2015, 12:23 PM Jul 2015

Martin O'Malley: Born to Run

Last edited Tue Jul 14, 2015, 01:28 PM - Edit history (1)

Gov. Martin O’Malley’s first taste of political success occurred in childhood. In 1976, O’Malley ran successfully against five other candidates for eighth-grade student body president at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Bethesda.

“This was the first time that I ran into the O’Malley political machine,” recalls Tim Mullin of Chevy Chase, one of O’Malley’s competitors. On the day of the election, Mullin arrived at school armed with posters, only to find the O’Malley family out in full force with “Vote O’Malley” signs and handing out lollipops with “Vote O’Malley” stickers on them. “I am coming around the corner after I hung my signs and, lo and behold, there is my younger sister Libby, then a first-grader, licking one of the O’Malley lollipops and passing others out to her classmates,” Mullin says.

O’Malley’s grandfathers were New Deal Democrats: one, a city, county and district chairman in Fort Wayne, Ind.; the other, a ward leader in Pittsburgh, Pa. The governor’s parents met in the early 1950s at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. Barbara O’Malley (then Barbara Suelzer), having worked on the campaign of the Fort Wayne, Ind., congressman she helped to elect, had moved to D.C. to work in his congressional office.

Politics were a part of life in the O’Malley household. Schempp remembers her mother taking them to Hubert Humphrey headquarters and holding an election night party at home to celebrate Lyndon Johnson’s win. The governor says his first real political memory is the day after Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968.He recalls going downstairs, getting a bowl of cereal and looking for cartoons on TV, only to find news coverage. “I remember sensing that something was very wrong,” O’Malley says.

When he was 7, O’Malley helped campaign for his father’s law school friend, Republican James Gleason, who was on his way to becoming the first Montgomery County executive. O’Malley passed out campaign material and had his first experiences canvassing door to door...

read more: http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/Bethesda-Magazine/November-December-2008/Born-to-Run/

(Martin O'Malley) says that a value system based on his Catholic faith and honed by a Jesuit education at Gonzaga has been at the heart of his political career. He says he learned not merely to have faith in God and in his own ability to help others, but to act on his principles and risk failure.

Gonzaga, from which he graduated in 1981, put O'Malley in an urban setting that exposed him to homelessness and economic depredation. The school, O'Malley said, not only instituted a rigorous Jesuit academic culture, but tried to produce "men for others."

"I remember coming in from the suburbs and seeing the blight as we filed by lines of homeless people," O'Malley recalls. But it was in that environment where he says he learned from one of his mentors, the late Rev. Horace B. McKenna, S.J., what public service was all about.

But it wasn't from second hand experience where Gonzaga wanted its young men to learn to become good people. The school pushed students to reach out to the local community.

O'Malley enrolled in a seminar that split time between discussing issues of social justice inside the classroom and tutoring inner city children outside of it...Even today, many see in his approach to public policy the fruits of his Jesuit education.

read more: http://somd.com/news/headlines/2006/4711.shtml

Barbara O'Malley, wife of lawyer Tom O'Malley (died in 2006), was a stay-at-home mom for two girls, Bridget and Eileen, and then four boys, Martin, Patrick and the twins, Peter and Paul. They lived in a three-bedroom house in Bethesda, and then moved to a bigger one in Rockville when the younger kids arrived...

But she was also a Democrat from an early age -- a dyed-in-the-wool, loyal-to-the-death Democrat. "I can't imagine being a Republican," she says now.

Her political heroes were Adlai Stevenson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. (Her father once won $10 from Vice President Truman in a poker game.) She worked in a local congressional campaign before she was old enough to vote.

His mother was the one who talked him into running for student council president in the seventh grade, with slogans like "Rally, Rally Around O'Malley" and "Dial O for O'Malley."

...take a tour of the O'Malleys' Rockville home and you understand why the Democratic party was in no danger of losing Martin to the opposition for long. Barbara O'Malley has hung the walls with antique campaign ribbons, her extensive collection of campaign buttons, and any number of political photographs. There are photos of John Kennedy, of herself and Adlai Stevenson, of her father standing near FDR and, more recently, of herself shaking hands with Al Gore at Senator Mikulski's office.

"I grew up with it," she says. "Politics was just something you talked about around the house."

read more: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-05-14/news/0005110185_1_martin-omalley-pale-blue-stay-at-home-mother

His grandfathers were New Deal Democrats: one, a ward boss in Pittsburgh; the other, chairman of an Indiana congressional district. Growing up in Bethesda and Rockville, the third of six siblings, Martin O'Malley says he learned an ethos of political involvement from his parents, who first met at Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1954.

"You just don't sit there in passive silence when you can contribute some ideal," says his mother, Barbara O'Malley, a longtime Capitol Hill receptionist for Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.). Her husband, Tom O'Malley, who died in January, was a trial lawyer, "a modern-day Atticus Finch and a great man," Martin O'Malley says.

In his campaign, he cites the Jesuit ideal of being "a man for others," instilled in him at Gonzaga College High School, a few blocks north of the Capitol. While there, he also experienced an ethnic awakening that helped shape the public figure he is today.

Faith and persistence, O'Malley says. Consider Hugh O'Neill, the leader he admires most in Irish history, a 16th-century chieftain who fought a stubborn war of resistance against the English hundreds of years before the Republic of Ireland was at last born.

O'Malley wrote a paean to him and sang it with the band. Now, cruising along Interstate 95 in the SUV, the campaign day not yet over, he is reminded of the lyrics.

"But to those who would say such struggle was folly . . . one man backed his dreams up with action."

He smiles. "Great stuff, huh...?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR2006103101407_5.html