How To Rebuild a Party - The O'Malley Way

'The former Maryland governor and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate is wasting no time in helping to put Democrats - now on the verge of extinction - back on the road to recovery by putting his money where his mouth is. You might recall that O'Malley had pleaded with Democratic leaders to pay more attention to state and local races and was ignored, and the results of that inattention can no longer be dismissed. (The party itself is being dismissed.) So that's what he's doing - addressing the problem. He was in Delaware this past Saturday campaigning for Stephanie Hansen, the Democratic nominee for the special election for the Delaware state Senate seat in the Tenth Senatorial District, which Democrat Bethany Hall-Long recently vacated to become the state's lieutenant governor. The outcome of this election decides party control of the state Senate. The election is scheduled for February 25.
Hansen (below) is the sort of Democrat that O'Malley wants to see at all levels of government. She is for preserving open space and balancing development with open space preservation, improving public schools, and preserving property tax credits for elderly constituents on a fixed income. In other words, she, like O'Malley, is a progressive but not a nut about it.

O'Malley has already campaigned for Democrats in state legislative races, most notably for Jim Lykam in a special state Senate election in Iowa, which Lykam won. O'Malley knows that, if the Democrats have any chance of coming back for 2018 and 2020 and avoid the fate of the Whigs in the 1850s, they have to win at the local level and work their way up. They need state legislative seats, school board seats, municipal council seats, mayoralties, and county executive positions - then they need to regain governorships and U.S. congressional seats. And they need to engage voters on the local level and find out what's on their minds, not just read opinion polls. That's why O'Malley is supporting this man for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship.

He is Pete Buttigieg, the current mayor of South Bend, Indiana. An openly gay man who served in the Navy Reserves during the Afghanistan War (and while he was mayor, at that), he has made redevelopment of South Bend a top priority in his administration, and he's made a point in getting things done and showing how municipal government can work. More to the point, though, he's young, he's experienced, he's smart (he was a Rhodes Scholar) and he's a Midwestern Democrat who knows how to talk to people in a region of the country that went solidly for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Which is why he's perfect for the job . . . well, not entirely perfect. He's still an incumbent officeholder, and that may impede him should he be elected chairman. But Buttigieg, a millennial, represents the future of the country far better than Tom Perez or Keith Ellison; he's mostly been unsullied by inside Washington politics. (Buttigieg did work for an international-policy consulting firm in Washington for a year.) '>>>

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