Martin O’Malley brings presidential campaign to SC.
By Robert Kittle
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley brought his Democratic presidential campaign to South Carolina Tuesday, meeting in Columbia with the 20/20 Leaders for America group and leaders from historically black colleges and universities.
Recent polls have him tied for third place in the Democratic primary, with Hillary Clinton having a substantial lead, Bernie Sanders in second, and O’Malley tied with Jim Webb.
O’Malley sat down with us to talk about his campaign and the issues.
How can he overcome Hillary Clinton’s big lead, and the fact that her nomination has often been called “inevitable” since even before she announced?
“Sometimes seeming inevitability can be a great weakness, especially as unhappy as all of us are with how our national politics is functioning and dysfunctioning and how our economy’s no longer working for most of us,” he says. “What I hear people ask for all across the country is new leadership and an ability to get things done. This is the first decade this side of World War II where 70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 10 or 12 years ago, and that’s not how our economy or our country’s supposed to work. There are better choices we need to make, and that’s why people are looking for new leadership and that’s why I believe they’re going to respond to my message, as well as 15 years of not just making promises but getting things done.” . .
One of our viewers, Brandon Ledford, wanted to know what he would do to bring jobs back to the U.S. and keep current jobs here.
O’Malley says, “I think a couple of things. I believe that we have a huge business and job- creating opportunity in embracing the challenge of climate change. In other words, I am the only candidate calling for us to move to 100 percent clean electric grid by 2050. And in that movement is the creation of five million new jobs, in green design, in solar, in wind, in other technologies, and new smarter infrastructure that can handle a dynamic and distributed energy-generation future. But we also have to stop doing some things that actually hurt our economy and ship jobs abroad, like bad trade deals. We all saw what happened after NAFTA. We still see the evidence in closed factories and textiles mills that are no longer in business, and I believe this Trans-Pacific Partnership is just the latest example of our stumbling backwards, blindfolded, into the propeller blades of another bad trade deal. The bottom line for our country in trade deals should be to raise standards for workers and raise standards for the environment, not to lower them and allow our multi-national corporations to move jobs and profits abroad.”
He says he thinks the number one issue our country is facing right now is the economy. “Our country’s doing better. We’re creating more jobs every month than we lose, but we can’t say our economy’s doing better for all of us and working for all of us when 70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago, when we’re saddling our kids with more college debt than any generation in American history or any other country on the globe.” . .
Despite Hillary Clinton’s lead, he points out that she was also leading by a wide margin in the 2008 primaries before losing to Barack Obama.
http://wbtw.com/2015/08/04/martin-omalley-brings-presidential-campaign-to-sc/
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