Op-Ed: O’Malley’s Money By Fletcher R. Hall

As a Democratic candidate for the office of president of the United States, former Maryland Governor and Baltimore City Mayor Martin O’Malley offers an interesting insight into the issue of finances and being a candidate for the highest office in the land.

O’Malley has little accumulated personal wealth. He was paid $150,000 as governor of Maryland and his wife, whose father is former Maryland Attorney General Joe Curran, is a district court judge.

It appears that political posturing and inside politics may have been at play. However, her appointment was little questioned in a state with 2-1 Democrat registration and, at the time of her appointment, a Democratic governor and Democratic legislature.

O’Malley surely represents the professional class of which there are too many in both Washington and Annapolis.

Now, I personally am opposed to the amounts of money being infused into all elections, whether spent in local, state, or national elections. What prevents elected officials from being indebted to their contributors?

There is no free lunch in politics.

O’Malley, who currently is not faring well in national political polls, has raised some $2 million dollars for his campaign. Most of this money has been raised in the Washington, D.C. suburbs where he grew up, and from the Baltimore area, both of these being liberal bastions. All of the figures alluded to here were, as required by law, reported to the Federal Election Commission last week.

Should lighting strike and the Democratic nomination become a real horserace, O’Malley may have a problem as the current frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, has an entirely different personal financial situation and has already raised many millions of dollars. The filings from the Federal Election Commission indicate that O’Malley would not be able to loan his own campaign substantial money.

Then there is Jeb Bush, a Republican candidate who has made some $29 million after leaving office as governor in 2007. Thus far, he has raised multiple millions of dollars.

Can O’Malley raise the amount of money needed to stay in the presidential race? The question remains problematic at this point in the race to the nomination. Since money is the mother’s milk of politics and is a competitive struggle for dollars for the 2016 nomination, O’Malley will have find a more successful and aggressive way to raise money.

One wonders why O’Malley is really running for president. It is obvious that the money raised for his campaign allows him to fly around the country and enjoy many of the perks he enjoyed in his days as governor. His only non-political jobs are as an ad hoc professor at Johns Hopkins University and as a board member of a Baltimore-based technology firm.

There is no doubt that campaign reform is seriously needed. It appears neither Congress nor the American electorate has yet established the political will to make reform a national priority.

Martin O’Malley, at this time has neither the financing nor the support to win the Democrat nomination for President.

His would appear to be mostly on an ego-driven campaign based on the liberal record he established as governor of Maryland. Even in Democrat-dominated Maryland, his policies were rejected and a Republican elected governor.