O'Malley, a former two-term Maryland governor and likely presidential candidate, usually plays in an Irish rock band, but tonight's tune is This Land is Your Land, a song that's both patriotic — every school kid learns it — and political: It was written by Woody Guthrie as a leftist rebuke to God Bless America.
That's O'Malley's pitch to voters right now: a call to greatness combined with populist rage against Wall Street, similar to that of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has resisted calls to run for president herself. But while the prospect of a Warren candidacy has stirred excitement among many liberal activists, O'Malley's much more likely bid has so far failed to register in opinion polls. Whether his new message resonates with voters in coming months could determine whether a path exists for him to emerge as a credible alternative to Hillary Clinton.
"There is no reason that billionaires should crowd us out from our democracy,'' O'Malley told the crowd Tuesday night. "Do you want this to be a country where only the rich can get ahead?"
Until recently, O'Malley's pitch focused on his record as an effective, data-driven mayor and governor who also helped enact liberal priorities in Maryland, including same-sex marriage, a higher minimum wage, in-state tuition and driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants and an end to the death penalty.
He still talks about the need for elected leaders to "get things done,'' but in a Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, N.H. — a regular ritual for presidential hopefuls — he focused on concentration of wealth and falling wages for the middle class.
When did he start channeling Elizabeth Warren? Like every other governor, O'Malley says, he saw the damage of the foreclosure crisis and the recession that followed the 2008 financial meltdown.
"It's not a matter of getting religion. It's a matter of getting how badly this behavior damaged people throughout our country,'' he told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday.
CHALLENGING HIS PARTY
New Hampshire Democrats are longtime Clinton fans — she won here in 2008 — but O'Malley gets a warm welcome, because the only thing voters here like more than their presidential primary is a furiously contested presidential primary.
"Even if you want Hillary to be the nominee, you still want her to get put through her paces. She needs to get sharpened,'' says Vicki Meagher, a playwright at the Young Democrats event who says she'd be happy to vote for O'Malley over Clinton in the primary. "I think Hillary's time has passed.''
Melanie Levesque, a former state representative, is already pledged to Clinton because they go "way back,'' but she wants O'Malley to run anyway. "We definitely need to have some kind of debate.''
O'Malley, 52, mentions Clinton as little as possible, though his references to "fresh" and "new" leadership aren't that hard to figure out, and he isn't the first to imply that Clinton's Wall Street donors might make her less enthusiastic about reining in the financial industry.
"People are looking for a leader independent of powerful, wealthy special interests that always push to the front of the line,'' he says. He won't say he's more liberal than Clinton — politics isn't left or right but "forward or back,'' he says. "I do believe I'm speaking to where our country's going and not to where it's been.''
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