Martin O’Malley: The Man Who Would Be Vice President

For well over a year now, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley
has been testing the waters for a presidential run. The
National Journal‘s Shane Goldmacher just filed a
report on how that’s been going; as far as I’m concerned,
the heart of his story is here:

O’Malley hasn’t outlined, at least publicly, what
his candidacy is about, other than being a progressive not named
Hillary Clinton. “What are you passionate about?” one Democratic
activist in Iowa City asked him back in October. “If you were king
of the world, what would you do first thing?”

His answer was directionless. “I’m passionate about my kids and
their future,” O’Malley began. “I’m passionate about climate
change. I’m passionate about public safety. Having been mayor of
Baltimore, I learned a little something about that and drug
addiction along the way. I’m passionate about educating our people
at higher and better levels. I’m passionate about health and
improving outcomes. The bottom line is for you, Tom, all about
jobs, right? How do we restore the balance for jobs?”

Most of Hillary’s other
potential challengers have ideological reasons to embark on a
longshot crusade. Jim Webb (who
appears to be running), Bernie Sanders (who’s thinking
about running), and Brian Schweitzer (who at the moment seems
to have stopped thinking about running, though
who knows?) are critics of Clinton’s stances on war and Wall
Street, albeit from somewhat different positions. (Sanders is a
self-described socialist,
Schweitzer is a so-called “libertarian
Democrat,” and Webb is a sort of
left-wing paleoconservative, if that makes any sense.)
Elizabeth Warren, who insists she isn’t running but keeps getting
treated as a contender anyway, is a step or two to Clinton’s left
on economics.

But O’Malley does not have any glaring policy differences with
Clinton, a figure he has backed in the past. His campaign looks
more like an exercise in personal ambition than a policy crusade,
but it’s a funny sort of ambition, since his chances of getting the
nomination are vanishingly small. My working theory is that he’s
actually gunning for Clinton’s vice presidential slot. But then,
I’ve been idly predicting that O’Malley would one day be the
Democrats’ veep nominee for at least eight
years now, going back to when O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore.
So that might just be my idée fixe.

Bonus link: Longtime O’Malley critic David Simon
bumps into
the ex-gov on a train.