Maryland's Wacky Wefty's Gone Wild

The Wall Street Journal has a good opinion piece interviewing Maryland's Republican Gov. Ehrlich and my brief experiences in Maryland Dem politics came back into memory. When I met my wife, she had just finished a two-year stint as a Legislative Asst. to Sen. Paul Sarbanes. After our wedding, which Sarbanes attended along with his wife [who told Marilyn that Paul had never stayed at a wedding reception as long--three hours---as he had at our shindig in the Georgetown Four Seasons], we became good friends with some key Sarbanes staffers from the Free State as well as other Marylanders with political mojo in Montgomery County.

So the WSJ article sounds familiar since some things---including Maryland's excessively heavy economic dependence on USG funding and projects---have not changed much despite two and a half decades of largely Republican administrations. The Wal-Mart fiasco, which penalizes the state's largest employer and probably forced the company to move a proposed supply facility elsewhere, demonstrates that Maryland will spite its economic face rather than allow market forces to operate freely.

However, the single most interesting politician, one who threatens the entire Democratic Party ramshackle philosophical Potemkin village, is Michael Steele, who is running for Sarbanes's vacated Senate seat. You see, Steele is black. The entire Dem apparatus, including the delusionally bat-guano crazy-left Baltimore Sun, feels Steele would undermine their entire substratum of black apparatchiki voting base in the DC area, as well as give the lie to the canard that blacks benefit from nanny-state socialism as practiced in the Free State.

If the Repubs can win a Senate seat in Maryland, their first since Tydings way back when [or was it Beall?], it would bring a little sanity into the national dialogue in the World's Most Exclusive Club. Like Sen. Brooke in Mass way back when, it would show that Repubs don't merely appoint blacks like Powell and Rice, they elect them also.