DAVENPORT, Iowa — Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley launched his long-shot White House bid Saturday with populist attacks on corporate giants, big banks and political dynasties, offering himself as a younger, more progressive alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“We cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and the powerful,” O’Malley told a sweaty crowd at Baltimore’s Federal Hill Park before coming here to campaign in the nation’s first presidential nominating state. “Let’s be honest. They were the ones who turned our economy upside-down in the first place. And they are the only ones who are benefiting from it.”
Even as a few protesters at the park sought to link O’Malley’s time as Baltimore mayor to recent unrest in the city, he said the rioting there underscored an urgent need to invest in struggling communities.
“The scourge of hopelessness that happened to ignite here that evening transcends race or geography,” he said. “The hard truth of our shared reality is this: Unemployment in many American cities and in many small towns across the United States is higher now than it was eight years ago. Conditions of extreme and growing poverty create conditions for extreme violence. We have work to do.”
O’Malley will visit New Hampshire, another early nominating state, on Sunday. Creating a base of support there and in Iowa is crucial to his upstart strategy. He is banking on the prospect that Clinton’s dominant popularity will crater as more voters assess the baggage she brings to the race. Despite multiple trips to key states over the past two years, O’Malley remains largely unknown to voters and registers in the low single digits in polls. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the only other declared Democratic candidate, has had early success courting liberals, drawing boisterous crowds in Iowa this week. But few give Sanders, a self-described socialist, any chance of winning the nomination.
Other potential hopefuls — including former senator Jim Webb of Virginia and former senator and governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — have not invested the time that O’Malley has in laying the groundwork for a serious run.
H. Boyd Brown, a South Carolina Democrat, said that he and other O’Malley backers are hoping for a repeat of the 2008 primary contest, in which front-runner Clinton succumbed to Barack Obama, then a largely unknown junior senator from Illinois.
“Her support then, as it is now, was a mile wide and an inch deep,” Brown said in an interview. If O’Malley can manage a strong showing in Iowa — where he plans to camp out in the coming months — “the dynamics completely change, and it’s game on.”
Other Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, have called the comparisons to Obama a pipe dream, noting that Clinton’s polling numbers are stronger than any non-incumbent president in memory.