Single-digit Democrats thrive in a shrinking Hillary shadow.WaPo

There are life cycles in insurgent presidential campaigns. First comes speculation about how they'd run, then speculation about they'd win, then the questions of why they're polling so poorly, then the stories of their resurgence. Some candidates, like 2012's Tim Pawlenty, do not live to cycle through this. O'Malley -- who, alone among Democrats is running a traditional barnstorming campaign -- may have had his sped up by the problems of Hillary Clinton. Both he and Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, flourished in the media shower of the Iowa State Fair. Both tried to plant a flag somewhere opposite Hillary Clinton -- with decreasingly subtle arguments about why Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) should not have that role to himself. . .

O'Malley threw himself into the fair life with more brio, peaking when he snapped a family selfie with the butter cow.

“Sixty days ago, when we got in, we were at one percent," he said. "After 30 days, we went to three. Latest poll has us at seven. And we’re going to keep going.”

At every turn, he met cameras attached to reporters who wanted to get his latest read on the competition. Unlike Webb, he had one.

Hillary Clinton? "There’s always an inevitable front-runner in the Democratic primary," O'Malley told one crew. "This is a choice between our past and a choice between our future."

Joe Biden? "I would welcome Vice President Biden’s entry into this race. He is a good and decent man who has served our country for decades."

Bernie Sanders? That one pulled O'Malley onto a limb. Asked if he thought the Democrats had a "problem" when a self-described democratic socialist sought their nomination, O'Malley disagreed, then worked his way into the affirmative.

"I don’t think it’s a problem for the Democratic Party, but it might be long-term for Sen. Sanders," he said. I believe that the Democratic Party has a tradition of offering pragmatic solutions to the problems that face us as a country. I am a lifelong Democrat, and I believe very deeply in the principles of our party. I believe in what Franklin Roosevelt was talking about and what John F. Kennedy was talking about. That’s why I choose to be a Democrat not just in presidential years but in every year of my life."

Asked if he was being squeezed out of the race, with Clinton on the right and Sanders on the left, O'Malley smiled wide.

"It's funny you see it like that," he said. "I see a whole lane opening."

O'Malley's own soap box speech had all the coiled energy that evaded Webb. His top two shirt buttons undone, his legs arching forward in what someone not running for president might call a yoga warrior stance, O'Malley boiled down the 15 goals of his potential presidency. He spent special time attacking "bad trade deals," a commonality with Webb and Sanders -- something Hillary Clinton could not agree with unless she flip-flopped. "China and India – they have countries of their own to invest in," said O'Malley,

After the speech, O'Malley went a little further, saying that China's recent devaluation of the Yuan looked to him like a sneaky manipulation. "I think we need to put much more pressure on the appropriate agencies, and take action on our own, to do the countervailing measures and impose the tariffs when those sort of things happen," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/14/single-digit-democrats-thrive-in-a-shrinking-hillary-shadow/