Living room by living room, O’Malley marches on in New Hampshire.
Martin O’Malley began his day on the campaign trail Wednesday with a bit of good news, or so he thought.
Soon after he arrived at the home of Kathleen DiFruscia in Windham, the first of five campaign stops on the docket for the day, Plaistow Democratic Committee Chairman George Hamblen informed O’Malley that he scored second place in the committee’s presidential straw poll earlier this summer.
“I came in second in the Plaistow straw poll!” the former Maryland governor and Democratic presidential hopeful beamed, throwing his arms around Hamblen.
Now, this particular sample may have yielded only 21 responses, and it might have been conducted not by a trained pollster but instead at an Old Home Days celebration in June, but no matter. O’Malley was not about to let this small victory pass by uncelebrated.
Just a few moments later – by which time O’Malley had moved on to try to squeeze in greetings with a few more guests before being called forward to speak – Hamblen realized he might have misspoken.
“He might have come in third,” the local Democratic activist confided. Indeed, a check over the results confirmed this suspicion: Hillary Clinton took the lead in with 11 votes, followed by Bernie Sanders with seven and O’Malley with three.
In a contest where much of the attention has been devoted to those other two contenders, O’Malley has struggled to seize his share of the spotlight during these initial stages of the Democratic race. But that’s not for a lack of trying.
This week, “trying” meant waking up at dawn Wednesday to fly to New Hampshire – his eighth trip since March – for a nearly 10-hour day on the campaign trail, followed by another morning of meetings and interviews the day after.
It meant stumping and standing for questions at the edge of a Windham patio, from atop a garden hose bin in a Portsmouth backyard, in front of a conference room at the McLane Law Offices in Manchester, before a bunch of prospective supporters at his campaign headquarters and, finally, in the middle of a crowded living room in Hollis. (In between, he found some time to duck into Manchester’s Granite State Barber Shop for a quick trim and to a nearby Subway restaurant to refuel with “lunch” about 5:45 p.m. before his final two stops.)
Along the way, O’Malley continued amplifying his critiques against the party establishment (for cutting back on the number of primary debates), against Donald Trump (“his brand of politics, quite frankly, disgusts me”) and, at times, his Democratic rivals. Where another candidate may represent politics of the past, O’Malley pitches a brand centered on “new leadership.” Where yet another candidate may fire up progressive crowds, O’Malley points to his “15 years of executive experience” as evidence that he’s able to translate progressive values into action.
In the absence of more debates, O’Malley asked the crowd in Hollis, “What is our message, the Democratic party? It seems our brand is what did Hillary Clinton know about her emails and when did she know it, and did she wipe her server or did she not?”
“That’s not a good brand for the fall,” he continued, adding that he respects Clinton and Sanders but wants more of a chance to engage with them before the elections. (The crowd, for their part, jeered along with him in agreement that the party needs more forums.)
This candidate, all the while, is keenly aware that he has a long way to go to gain ground. As O’Malley told the New Hampshire crowds he greeted this week, with a smirk: “I know there’s a fine line between delusion and imagination when one runs for president at 1 percent name recognition.”
But O’Malley and his team are staying optimistic. They’re taking it one conversation at a time – and this, they hope, will be what counts in the long run.
Spend a day observing him on the campaign trail, and it becomes clear that Martin O’Malley is a guy who pays attention to the little things.
You see it in his stump speeches – precise, passionate and at times poetic. The iterations he recited in New Hampshire this week were peppered with lines from Bruce Springsteen (“Is a dream a lie, if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?”) and Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks (“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond”), delivered with a kind of signature lilt and a tendency to bow forward when he’s making his most forceful points. He’s adjusting that delivery constantly, tinkering with the rhythm and flow, and admits that he’s trying to work on trimming it down to leave more time for questions.
Yuu also see it in O’Malley’s hands-on relationship with his campaign team. A seasoned strategist who got his start as a twentysomething field staffer for Gary Hart’s underdog presidential bid in 1983, O’Malley admits that it’s sometimes difficult to stay focused on being a candidate – not a de facto campaign manager.
In the car shuttling between campaign stops in Portsmouth and Manchester, O’Malley at one point turned to his New Hampshire state director, John Bivona, in the back seat: Did his team happen to find that blog he put together during his final days as governor? (They hadn’t yet, but they would take a look, Bivona assured.) Turning forward again, O’Malley scrolled through his iPad to dig up a link, explaining that the blog was meant as kind of a collection of “closing transition memos” for his time in office.
“The field staff in Iowa have found it very helpful as they talk to people,” O’Malley suggested, and it might be useful when trying to point to more specifics about his record.
“I was telling myself to pull back earlier today when I was complaining about something,” O’Malley conceded later in the afternoon as he waited for his haircut. “I found myself emailing our Iowa director asking him if he had ‘X’ amount of literature to get to New Hampshire.” He’s still learning, he adds – and even for all of his involvement, he really is proud of the work his staff is doing.
And then there’s the attention O’Malley pays during one-on-one conversations, with voters or otherwise. As a candidate without a sea of security or staff or scribes following his every move, he’s able to freely work the room before and after events.
You also see it in O’Malley’s hands-on relationship with his campaign team. A seasoned strategist who got his start as a twentysomething field staffer for Gary Hart’s underdog presidential bid in 1983, O’Malley admits that it’s sometimes difficult to stay focused on being a candidate – not a de facto campaign manager.
In the car shuttling between campaign stops in Portsmouth and Manchester, O’Malley at one point turned to his New Hampshire state director, John Bivona, in the back seat: Did his team happen to find that blog he put together during his final days as governor? (They hadn’t yet, but they would take a look, Bivona assured.) Turning forward again, O’Malley scrolled through his iPad to dig up a link, explaining that the blog was meant as kind of a collection of “closing transition memos” for his time in office.
“The field staff in Iowa have found it very helpful as they talk to people,” O’Malley suggested, and it might be useful when trying to point to more specifics about his record.
“I was telling myself to pull back earlier today when I was complaining about something,” O’Malley conceded later in the afternoon as he waited for his haircut. “I found myself emailing our Iowa director asking him if he had ‘X’ amount of literature to get to New Hampshire.” He’s still learning, he adds – and even for all of his involvement, he really is proud of the work his staff is doing.
And then there’s the attention O’Malley pays during one-on-one conversations, with voters or otherwise. As a candidate without a sea of security or staff or scribes following his every move, he’s able to freely work the room before and after events.
was running late to the party in Portsmouth in part because he lingered behind at the previous stop to keep talking to voters and answering questions from a small gaggle of reporters, who peppered him with questions about Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Judy Rowan, one of the voters who was kept waiting, cared less that he was late to arrive and more that he made sure to apologize for the delay. Not every candidate she’s seen this cycle has been as considerate of their audience’s time, she said.
Zoe Stewart, also among those in the Portsmouth backyard, recalled seeing O’Malley at an event in New Hampshire about a year ago. He was one of several big-name politicians in attendance, and Stewart was struck by his effort to spend so much time talking with the young political staffers at that event.
“I find with some of these older statesmen, the blindfolds are on,” Stewart added, “and you don’t see that.”
A few times throughout the day, O’Malley told New Hampshire voters a story about one of their counterparts in Iowa who approached him after a recent event to let him know this was her third time seeing him.
“I said, ‘Well, how am I doing?’ ” he recalled. “And she said, ‘I’m seeing a lot of growth.’ ”
woman went on to tell him that, in the end, she would vote for “the one that’s grown the most.”
If O’Malley remains optimistic, it’s because of comments like this – and his faith that, as he witnessed firsthand in 1984, history might be on his side. If he’s taken one lesson to heart from his time on the Hart campaign, it’s that “a candidate with no money and no name recognition could nonetheless go out there and offer ideas to serve our country” and, ultimately, could be rewarded once voters had their say.
Already, he’s starting to see this living room-by-living room approach pay off: One of the people who hosted a party for him this week had offered to do so after seeing him at another home in Keene last month; another voter who saw him in Portsmouth this week said he wanted to set up another event at his home soon, too.
“I recall in 1983, Alan Cranston was all the rage in the summer. He actually beat that year’s inevitable front-runner, Walter Mondale, in the Wisconsin straw poll,” O’Malley mentioned between stops. “The candidate that emerged that year worked methodically, town to town, leading with ideas and exciting people with ideas, with the possibilities of what could be.”
And, he added, “If you look at the trajectory of other candidates who have been successful in New Hampshire, they are not –” he paused, exhaling a laugh. “They are not the candidates who peaked early.” So, the way he sees it: “We’ve got that going for us.”
https://politics.concordmonitor.com/2015/08/politics-election/living-room-by-living-room-omalley-marches-on-in-new-hampshire/
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