http://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/local/politics/null-39560397.html

O'Malley winning more than he is losing

By Len Lazarick
Examiner Staff Writer 2/15/09

The governor has charge of his 6-year-old son Jack in the mornings, while his wife the judge and his other three children trudge off to Baltimore for work and school. He said Jack had been "rejected" from day care that morning because of suspicious bumps on his back. The governor thought the bumps were not really itchy, as his son claimed, but he'd have a doctor check them out.

Like many a sick child in a parent's office but especially a high-energy youngster who seemed not the least bit ill, Jack was a major league distraction for his dad, and a hoot to The Examiner reporter and photographer. He first picked up a shillelagh, then a bat (what was a bat doing in the governor's office?) and finally a poker for the gas-fueled fireplace in the elegant executive suite of the centuries old State House.

As the boy swung the poker near some of the ornamental glass, his exasperated dad finally said, "Hey, stop that. You see that stuff up here. If you break it, you have to buy it."

"Why?" asks Jacko, in an exchange familiar to any parent. "Because you can do a lot of damage with that thing," said his gubernatorial parent.

No damage done, except for his father's train of thought.

Even for one of the most constitutionally powerful governors in America, there are limits to that power both at home and at work, as O'Malley knows full well. The legislature may not be a 6-year-old, but it also has the pesky habit of asking: "Why?" when the governor tries to get his way.

Here is an edited transcript of The Examiner's exclusive interview. (The governor's frequent asides to Jack have been edited out.)

The other day, President Obama kept saying in TV interviews, "I screwed up." I don't recall you ever saying anything like that.

Oh no, surely I have. My very first police commissioner, who served all of about 57 days -- I said, 'I made a mistake and I'm sorry.'

No, I meant as governor.

So far these two years? Not yet. I'm sure that there's something that I'll have to publicly acknowledge was a big screw-up.

On the BGE thing, I did publicly say I wish I could have succeeded [in reducing rates]. I didn't. I failed there. We then came back and made the biggest [financial] recovery in U.S. history. I promised to fight to stop it and I did fight to stop it. I wasn't successful in stopping it. And I acknowledged that failure.

You wind up as governor doing some things that are like Obama said about the stimulus package: "I don't like everything about it, but we need to do it."

Sure. That's part of what it takes to forge the consensus and reach a compromise to move things forward. And that's what we've done.

The tax package that passed was different than the one you propose.

Once we came back for the second go at it, and got rid of that cockamamie computer services tax, and we're able to wrestle the progressive income tax out of it, it was closer in the end to what I proposed.

There are times when I've made mistakes. There are times when we fail to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves, but everyday we wake up and we try. And if we're not successful, we pick ourselves up the next morning and try to learn from the failure and be more successful next time.

There are no magic wands in this office. You don't win every battle. But if you try every day, you win more than you lose.

What has surprised you about the job?

The thing that is most surprising to me is how much harder it to communicate to the public you serve.

When you're in local government, the verb of "mayor" communicates itself -- it communicates the goals and is very close to people. When you're struggling and fighting here, in order to do, we hope, a number of short term, unpopular things for the shared goal of creating the best public school system in the nation for our kids, it's hard to communicate the connection between, say, a penny increase in the sales tax and having the best public schools in America.

And that's different than being mayor?

Even as mayor when you had to do difficult things - like making cuts, doing layoffs, or increasing this fee or that tax - it was always very easy to say the reasons we're doing this is for additional police or more school construction or so that we can do a better job of maintaining our roads. It was a much easier nexus between even the unpopular actions you had to take and the outcome you were seeking. In this job, it is much more difficult to communicate that.

William Donald Schaefer has always said that being mayor was the best job he ever had. How about you?

What he probably liked most about being mayor and what I miss most, is the ability to directly help people. In this job, one spends a lot of energy, a lot of capital and a lot of time in indirectly helping people. Some days that can be a lot less gratifying than being able to directly help people. I think you're a step removed.

The good thing about this job, and the thing I do find gratifying and rewarding, is that I'm able to start to fix the performance of departments that that have underperformed, such as parole and probation, juvenile services, child protective services, foster care.

You seem so committed to abolishing the death penalty. But, with your powers as governor, for all five of those guys on death row you could say: "Your sentence is now life without parole." Why don't you just go ahead and do that?

Because it's not just about these five guys and it's not just about the power I have to hold in trust for a brief period of time. It's about whether this is the law of our state or whether it's not the law of our state. It's about whether we continue to stand with North Korea, Iran and China or whether we join the more noble company of states that recognize the death penalty is not a deterrent, that recognize that the death penalty is counter to belief in the dignity of every individual, and that the dollars we spend currently prosecuting death penalty cases are dollars that could be used saving lives, reducing homicides and reducing violent crime.

There are some issues that one campaigns on and talks about and then there are other issues that find you. But when they find you, you can't run from them.

So the death penalty found you?

The death penalty found me. It's been lifted to a level of salience and timeliness. I think that with a straight up or down vote in the Senate and the House, we can be successful in repealing it.

The Tax Foundation has come out recently saying that Maryland has slipped in its business climate. Do you feel what you've done has improved the business climate?

I do. I think that foundations like that, ideologically based, define success for a business and a business climate as beginning and ending with taxes. Under their logic, a state like Alabama and Mississippi would be the greatest states in the world for some [company] like MedImmune [the Gaithersburg pharmaceutical firm] but they're not. Increasingly, in our country, with our quality of life and our standard of living, our ability to generate wealth, create wealth and to build new businesses depends on the brainpower, innovation and skills of our people. In that slice of the global economy, education, higher education and institutions of highly skilled and highly innovative workers really become the job generators.

You'll find plenty of other states that have lower tax rates than ours, but you won't find another one that has a better school system. You may find other states where you can buy a stretch of land at a cheaper price, but you won't find any state in the union that has the number of high performing, highly innovative institutions like Hopkins, NIH, Fort Detrick, not to mention NSA and all the others.

In my discussions with people, there are lots of other factors that go into locating a business. And if you look even at the unemployment rate and job creation, until December, we were one of only 10 states that had positive job growth in this last miserable year. As our country comes out of this recession, you'll see Maryland ahead of most other states in adding jobs and creating jobs and it's because of that big investment we made in intellectual capital. These are the things that make one state more competitive than another.

What are the biggest long-term problems that Maryland is facing ?

They are the same challenges we face as a country and the globe. The big challenges facing our state break down into the three big categories - first, sustainability, in terms of the land, the air, the water, the Bay and the energy we consume that affects all three of those things.

The other big challenge is the skills of our people. It's great to be the number one school system in America, but that still only ranks us a "B." And if you look at college affordability, even for the strides we've made in four years, we're still leaps and bounds more expensive than most other countries and we're slipping.

The third thing is security -- not only in making us a safer state in the traditional sense of wrestling our corners away from drug dealers and reducing the appalling high level of homicides. But there is also the homeland security threat, given our proximity to the nation's capital and the extreme likelihood that there will be subsequent attacks in the course of this next hundred years of asymmetrical warfare.

All of those are the big challenges. If I toss and turn and can't sleep at night, those are the things I think about. If I wake up with energy and gratitude to be doing work worth doing, those are the things I think about.

Do you toss and turn at night?

Not often. [He smiles and chuckles] Sometimes.