Why Latinos should mourn Martin O’Malley’s exit

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'Long before Clinton was even giving interviews to news outlets about her campaign, O’Malley had already visited Univision’s Sunday morning politics show with Jorge Ramos, who shortly thereafter called O’Malley’s immigration plan the most comprehensive plan in the entire race.

O’Malley favored expanding deportation relief to more people, supported extending health care to recipients of deferred action programs and came out strongly against immigration detention facilities that even President Barack Obama had employed. He proposed expanding due process protections in the immigration system and spoke out against racial and religious profiling by Department of Homeland Security agencies.

And he wasn’t just talk. As governor of Maryland, O’Malley pushed for and signed legislation that allowed unauthorized immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses so they may safely get to and from work. By contrast, Clinton, as she has often been criticized for doing, flip-flopped on the same issue during her first run for the presidency in 2007. There is still no direct mention of the issue in her immigration platform today.

And the thing about O’Malley was that no one had pushed him to the left or right on immigration. He was just there.

Maybe this stemmed from him being a relative newcomer to the national stage and being shielded from having to weigh in on the subject, but as opposed to Sanders, who became much more interested in issues close to people of color once Black Lives Matter protesters famously interrupted his speech, and Clinton, who seems to wait until polls declare that it is politically expedient to support an issue and was pushed to the left on issues due to Sanders’ rise, O’Malley was on the spot from the get-go.

He was like the scrawny freshman at the varsity football team tryout who turns out to have a rocket for an arm, or the idealist college student who walks into an overzealous political activism group and, to the group’s surprise, actually believes what it has to say.

Much like Sanders, he called for criminal justice reforms in areas that disproportionately affected people of color such as the criminalization of marijuana and the disparity in sentencing between crack possession and powder cocaine possession. He also proposed investing more in job-training programs and restoring voting rights to people with felony records who had served their penalties.

Things didn’t end up working out for O’Malley, but his stances, especially for Latinos, were refreshing in the light of broken promises from both Republicans (Bush’s failed push for immigration reform in 2007) and Democrats (the wait for reform during the entire Obama administration), and the pandering of the current crop of candidates.

After O’Malley announced the end of his campaign, his staffers and supporters took to social media to thank him for pushing the other Democratic candidates to the left. I’m not sure that actually happened. O’Malley’s impact on Clinton was minimal to nonexistent, and if the former Secretary of State veered left, it was mostly due to a strong challenge from Sanders. As for Sanders, it’s hard to go left of him.

But O’Malley did have sound policy suggestions that should have appealed to black and brown voters. It’s unclear why that didn’t happen. But maybe O’Malley, with his Kennedy-esque charisma, his unwillingness to hit below the waistline and his idealistic talk, was just not the right candidate for this social media and cable news driven age, where the Republican front-runner until Tuesday was a reality TV star and real estate mogul with a penchant for the outrageous.

Partly to blame for O’Malley’s exit is today’s politics landscape, which values bombast and soundbites over substantial debates about issues. Also problematic for O’Malley were decisions by the Democratic National Committee to air the party’s debates on times when few people would be tuning in, giving a dark-horse candidate even less of a chance to stand out. And compounding the issue was the news media’s tunnel vision during this race, in which it turned all its attention to spotlighting how a Jewish Democratic Socialist was quickly becoming Clinton’s top challenger.

During the NBC News Democratic Debate, moderators allowed Clinton and Sanders to answer a question about the drug epidemic, a subject which O’Malley had fairly strong stances on, and then denied him an opportunity to chime in. The former Maryland governor practically begged Lester Holt of NBC News for 10 seconds to weigh in on the question but was promptly ignored in order to send the debate to commercials.

In the end, it all comes down to O’Malley. Something about him just did not generate the excitement necessary to make him a viable candidate in a race against a high-profile candidate, Clinton, and a dark horse, Sanders, who did exactly what O’Malley couldn’t in drawing out thousands of people to his support despite his long-shot status.

Over the Christmas break, O‘Malley held an event for one lonely supporter in the run-up to the caucuses and he could travel in Iowa airports freely without anyone noticing him. And so, it was to no one’s surprise that O’Malley took to the stump to step down on Tuesday. Even then, he stuck to the same highly idealistic rhetoric that had taken him nowhere during the campaign, saying: “The enduring symbol of America is not the barbed wire fence. It is the Statue of Liberty,” adding that the only thing wrong with politics is that “not enough people bother to try.”

O’Malley tried, and though his campaign went nowhere, Latinos and other people of color should be saddened by the exit of their champion who never really was.'

http://somos.blog.statesman.com/2016/02/02/column-why-latinos-should-mourn-martin-omalleys-exit/