O'Malley hoping for Iowa 'surprise' and N.H. momentum.
'O’Malley appeared confident about the potential for a surprise showing in Iowa.
“(The Iowa caucuses) are very confounding for pollsters … they’re very human and very dynamic,” he said. “There’s usually a reshuffling and usually a surprise.”
Also, O’Malley said, a longtime political writer recently told him, “I’ve learned not to take my eye off any unemployed governors who are spending a lot of time in Iowa.”
O’Malley said he has the executive experience Sanders and Clinton lack when it comes to successfully bringing various parties together to enact a progressive agenda for the country.
“There’s a big difference between the saying and the doing,” he said.
O’Malley pointed to his record as governor of Maryland, which was one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage after the passage of a bill he fought hard for. Also, O’Malley said, Maryland public schools ranked first in the nation for five years under his leadership because of unprecedented education investments.
“I’ve been at the forefront on policy since we got in,” O’Malley said, adding Clinton had “copied” large portions of her proposal for debt-free college tuition from his plan. O'Malley also said his plan to address the opioid epidemic federally was one of the first and most comprehensive.
As he told Seacoast Media Group last month, part of O’Malley’s plan of attack on the drug crisis would be a federal investment of $12 billion to help states provide the “continuum of care” that many are lacking to keep people on a safe path after detox or hospitalization and prevent relapses.
He said he would create a national strategy on fentanyl — the synthetic opioid much more powerful than heroin that has claimed more lives than heroin this year — within 100 days of taking office.
Regarding the “bellicose” rhetoric being spoken on the campaign trail by some Republican candidates, O’Malley said that a slow economic recovery partnered with extremist attacks in Paris and California create a perfect storm in which some voters become more accepting of exclusionary and even violent bombast from candidates.
“I see a great deal that’s worrying,” he said. “These are not ordinary times and (the Republican candidates) are each trying to one-up each other.”
“This is not the sort of sober, thoughtful foreign policy that this new era of conflict demands,” he added.
O’Malley said that the nature of terrorism is not necessarily to cause damage by direct attack, but to use the fear generated by it to cause a country to turn on itself and surrender its values.
“ISIL is never going to march … on Washington and take the constitution from our national archives, but we can shred it ourselves, one piece at a time,” he said. “The bellicose language … is part of where we are right now. We’re at a largely unprecedented time in our history.”
After Trump’s initial controversial proposal to ban all Muslims — including Muslim-Americans — from entering the United States “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” O’Malley said that he immediately instructed his staff to get him to local mosques in communities he was visiting.
“I’ve never seen the look in the eyes of Americans that I saw in those mosques,” he said. “That look of political dread in the eyes of our decent, patriotic Muslim neighbors has stuck with me.”
O’Malley said as Americans, we need to “hold true to the principles that unite us,” and that as citizens, it is our duty to fight on the homefront portion of the War on Terror by pushing back against rhetoric that divides and excludes.
A great source of optimism for O’Malley is the values he sees embodied in much of the under-30 demographic.
“They’re realistic about the big challenges we face, but they’re not consumed with fear about them,” he said, later adding that, “Emerging from this younger generation is the idea of a global commons.”
“I hope that young people turn out in this election. The greatest hope of our country is that they pull us out of these rather divided, fear-filled times we’re in,” he said.'
http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20160122/NEWS/160129588/101017/NEWS