Hoping to capitalize on debate performance, O’Malley to ‘park’ in Iowa.
'Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley is planning to “park” in Iowa in the coming weeks with the hope of gaining traction from a solid debate performance here on Saturday night, a campaign strategist said.
“The Iowa caucus voters are just starting to look at this race,” O’Malley consultant Bill Hyers said following the second Democratic debate. “We’re going to continue to grind it out. We have a lot of good will here.”
O’Malley, who has been stuck in the single digits in polls taken in the nation’s first caucus state, benefited Saturday from being one of just three remaining candidates in a Democratic field that has winnowed to him, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
During the debate, broadcast nationally by CBS, the former Maryland governor was central to the exchanges between Clinton and Sanders far more often than during the first Democratic debate last month. During that debate, O’Malley competed for attention with two other Democratic hopefuls who’ve since dropped out.
O’Malley repeatedly argued Saturday that he has a record of achieving progressive policy outcomes that his opponents only talk about. For example, he cited legislation he championed in Maryland in 2013 to impose stricter gun control and last year that raised the minimum wage.
“This is not merely theory in Maryland,” O’Malley of a bill that raised the minimum wage. “We actually did it.”
Pressed by a panelist, O’Malley conceded that his legislation raised the minimum wage in Maryland to $10.10 an hour, well shy of the $15 threshold he is now pushing nationally.
That was “all I could get the state to do by the time I left,” said O’Malley, whose second term ended in January.
O’Malley also offered several stinging critiques of Clinton during the two-hour broadcast. He accused her of being too cozy with Wall Street and described her proposal to regulate the financial industry as “weak tea.”
On gun control, O’Malley accused Clinton of being on “three sides” of the issue.
“When you ran (for the Senate from New York) in 2000, you said that we needed federal robust regulations,” O’Malley said. “Then, in 2008 (while running for president), you were portraying yourself as Annie Oakley and saying that we don't need those regulations on the federal level and now you're coming back around here. … There's a big difference between leading by polls and leading with principle.”
During the back-and-forth on that issue, Sanders, took a shot at O’Malley’s seven-year tenure as mayor of Baltimore, which preceded his eight years as governor of Maryland.
“I think it's fair to say that Baltimore is not now one of the safest cities in America,” Sanders said, prompting O’Malley to interrupt and say it’s “a lot safer” than it used to be. (The city recorded its 300th homicide Saturday -- the highest number since 1999, the year O'Malley became mayor.)
During some other exchanges during the night, O’Malley pleaded with the moderator, John Dickerson, to let him into the conversation, and at one point Dickerson cut him off, saying he was breaking the rules of the debate.
During his closing statement, O’Malley argued, as he has on the campaign trail, that the country needs new leadership, not “polarizing figures from our past.”
Whether O’Malley’s performance was strong enough to move the dial in the Democratic contest remains to be seen.
“I felt very good about it,” he told reporters afterward during a visit to the “spin room” at Drake University. “We finally got to make our case.”
Hyers, the O’Malley consultant, said he is confident Iowa caucus goers will give O’Malley a closer look now, and he argued that the dynamic ahead of the Feb. 1 contest remains fluid.
While O’Malley will not campaign exclusively in Iowa, residents of the Hawkeye State are going to see an awful lot of him between now and then, Hyers said.' >>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/15/hoping-to-capitalize-on-debate-performance-omalley-to-park-in-iowa/
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