Why Democrats need a liberal alternative?
It is not something that will divide the Party - it is something that will grow the Party.
A Party's participation is about message, as it is about money and polls. Democrats need a message that will connect with the people. Begging for money, in order to compete with the Republicans, over the social media network, is not the way to do it. The Republican majority, in the House and Senate, has grown to dangerous and extreme numbers. Simply because they do not know how to govern. Our country is not safe in their hands. We, as a people, must get our allies to the polls.
That is why it is imperative that Democrats have an alternative voice. We need the debate - an honest debate - about the ideas which our Party stands for. Candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Martin O'Malley, Sheldon Whitehouse, and others, should be encouraged to run for President. It would be the best for our Party and our country. We need rational and intelligent citizens representing us in Washington. Those that are "anti-government" are not usually very good at running our government. They are drawn to the darkside. They want to legislate their extreme minority views upon the rest of us. They are not inclined to protect our land, our water, or the air we breathe. It is time to put education, knowledge, intelligence, and science, back into good standing.
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The data-loving Maryland gov could have the greenest credentials of any '16 contender.
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) is nothing like any pop culture stereotype of a politician. He's not a boyishly charming airhead like George W. Bush or The Simpsons' Mayor Quimby, or a blunt, lovable grandpa like Joe Biden or The West Wing's Jed Bartlet. He's not even that much like the fictional politician based partly on him, The Wire's Tommy Carcetti, who like O'Malley became the unlikely white mayor of majority-black Baltimore. O'Malley has none of Carcetti's sleazy slickness. O'Malley comes across more like the sort of engaged administrator you would hire to turn around a moribund government agency.
In January, O'Malley will leave office after eight years because term limits prevented him from running for a third term. He will likely run for president in 2016, despite low name recognition and a lack of classic charisma. But whatever his seeming political deficits, he has won a steady stream of elections, made tangible progress in governing, and earned respect from progressives, including climate hawks.
When he walks in — no jacket, sleeves rolled up to his forearms — to the quarterly ClimateStat meeting at the Maryland State House in late October, where agency heads report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he amps up the dry proceedings with rapid-fire questions and his enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of policy. "That's awesome! That's a good use of GIS [geographic information system]," he exclaims over a map of tree coverage on the projector. (O'Malley likes data visualization; he later observes, "People under 40 communicate in charts and graphs."
ClimateStat meetings are run in a mahogany-heavy conference room by StateStat Director Matt Power. O'Malley is fond of organizing progress reports on various initiatives and labeling them with a name that ends in "Stat." It is a habit he picked up in Baltimore, where he expanded the famous CompStat system for urban crime fighting to a CitiStat approach for measuring progress, holding managers accountable, and correcting oversights across the government.
Whole article here:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/12/martin-omalley-longshot-presidential-candidate-and-real-climate-hawk
