Martin O’Malley, slogging through Iowa, insists he is still in the game.WaPo

As Democratic presidential long shot Martin O’Malley slogs through Iowa, he has pointed words for the rivals overshadowing him.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a “protest candidate,” he says, whose anger may not resonate so much with voters when it’s time to actually pick a president. And he says Hillary Rodham Clinton, “this year’s inevitable front-runner,” might “only be inevitable right up until the first contest.”

Lagging in the polls and struggling to raise money, the former Maryland governor insists he doesn’t regret waiting until late spring to launch his candidacy — after Sanders’s crowds had started to swell and Clinton had survived initial criticism over her private e-mail account and her family’s foundation. . .

O’Malley, who is taking far more questions on the trail from activists and reporters than Clinton or Sanders is, said he believes letting the voters take the “full measure” of him would serve him well.

Taking a shot a Clinton, he said Iowa voters had done that with her eight years ago, when she finished third “and only 29 percent of the people decided to be for her.”

“If I had gotten in in January, if I had gotten in the day after I got out of being governor, I still wouldn’t be a socialist,” O’Malley said, referring to Sanders. “I wouldn’t be calling for a political revolution. And he’s able to do that, which makes him more attractive to some who believe the establishment isn’t listening and a message needs to be sent right now.”

While Clinton and Sanders draw headlines, O’Malley is quietly courting voters here in the country’s first caucus state, going “town to town to town, the old-fashioned way.”

His campaign — which raised $2 million last quarter, compared with Clinton’s $47 million and Sanders’s $15 million — is focusing much of its limited resources on Iowa, hoping a strong showing will catapult O’Malley forward. He visited the State Fair in Des Moines on Thursday and has three stops planned Friday, including one in Clear Lake with the rest of the Democratic field.

“It’s frustrating for people that are helping to put gas in my tank and raise the money, because it’s like planting seeds in a field and you don’t see them come up for a while,” O’Malley said in an interview. “But that’s the nature of this. . . . We’re doing what we need to do in order to emerge here as the alternative.”

O’Malley, who is taking far more questions on the trail from activists and reporters than Clinton or Sanders is, said he believes letting the voters take the “full measure” of him would serve him well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/slogging-through-iowa-omalley-insists-he-is-still-in-the-game/2015/08/13/507e1570-41ce-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html