Fast forward to 2015: The press has declared the Democratic primary a two man race, much as they did in 2007. Then, it was Obama versus Clinton. Now it is Sanders versus Clinton. If Biden jumps in, we will have a three candidate race---

But wait. We already have a three candidate race. Just as we did in early 2007, when the corporate media “crib deathbed” John Edwards campaign by ignoring him. Only John Solomon for the WaPo wrote about Edwards in the early days of the primary, and his pieces were vicious attack fluff, like an interview with Edwards’ hairstylist intended to imply that the candidate was 1) vain about his good looks and 2) closeted gay and another about how the (rich former trial lawyer) had a big house. When Edwards came in second in the Iowa caucuses, E.J. Dionne, a guest on KO’s Countdown declared that Edward’s second place finish was the end of his campaign. Clinton’s third place finish meant she was still in the race. Is that what Karl Rove meant by The Math?

The press was never going to tolerate Edwards, who was running anti-Wall Street and pro-worker and pro-single payer. Never. And, as a handsome white southern male with all his hair and a much loved wife about to die of cancer, there was too good a chance that if nominated, he would sweep the general election. A Black candidate or a female candidate had more exploitable general election weakness. A Black candidate or a female candidate would give the eventual Republican nominee at least a fighting chance to rally to GOP base, despite its disenchantment with W., helping the party save face even if it couldn’t win the election. And so, the mainstream media went out of its way to kill Elizabeth Edwards’ dying wish, by denying the couple any attention at all. One of those Soviet style assassinations by silence. My heart breaks when I think about how much the stress of being helpless in the face of this unfair media blackout must have weighed in Elizabeth in her last days.

Who was the Elizabeth Edwards that the press was determined to silence?



Q: Is there a split between "new Democrats" and progressives, or what Paul Wellstone used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" Edwards: John gave a speech at the DNC meeting saying we don't need to reinvent our party; we just need to remember who we are. And who we are is the party of working people, including people who want to work and can't, people who have worked and are trying to retire. That's who we are and have always been. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that. It's easy to get misled with the DLC mantra "love the worker, love the employer." The employers can pretty much take care of themselves. So as a party our job is to give voice to those people who don't have a powerful voice. Unless that translates into votes or contributions, it turns out a lot of Democrats just ignore those people. They use language about working class people, but they are not out there with them. They use language about the immorality of poverty, but they are not out there. They generally support unions, but they are not walking picket lines. And so the difference it seems to me is not between old and new Democrats but between actual Democrats and rhetorical Democrats.

Another candidate wants us to remember who Democrats are. And that candidate is also suffering the death of a 1000 media omissions. I write about Governor Martin O’Malley. Watch as he discusses poverty in the US (and remember that in Ohio, food stamp money is being denied to mostly minority inner city residents while it is being funneled to mostly white rural residents.)

https://www.youtube.com/...



“We are all in this together.”

It isn’t just the words. It is the way he says them. O’Malley gives voice to those who do not have a voice.

This kind of talk does not endear O’Malley to the right wing. The Washington Times---which hired John Solomon after he made himself into a journalistic untouchable with his Edwards hatchet pieces---has Cal Thomas flinging the poo at the former Maryland Governor. O’Malley’s sin?



Who is he blaming for “wrecking” the economy? Big banks and Wall Street.

Sounds pretty “Democratic wing of the Democratic party” to me.

The GOP’s fear of O’Malley is not new. As far back as 2012, it was the topic of conversation in the press:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...



Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has become a punching bag for Republicans, taking it on the chin from leading politicians, strategists, analysts and conservative commentators as he ramps up his role in the national campaign.

Now, something funny happened in the spring of this year. Suddenly, the GOP started talking O’Malley up as the perfect person to challenge Clinton from the left. The GOP was scared shitless of Clinton. They were looking for the Great Leftist Hope, someone who could knock her out in the primary and give them a better chance in the general. And so we have Pat Buchanan promoting O'Malley:



Although Buchanan stated that O’Malley isn’t a serious threat to Hillary Clinton, and would be “unless she drops a lot more in the polls than she has thus far,” he did say “O’Malley has a golden opportunity, there’s no denying it, John. If Hillary Clinton’s got problems with her emails, he ought to be out there in iowa and new hampshire and around the country answering all those folks who said, ‘who is he?’ And become the populist, liberal, progressive candidate who runs a good positive campaign, who’s solid on the issues, who does not attack Hillary and build himself up as long as he can until she gets in, or maybe somebody else gets in to eclipse him. And so i think that he’s in an excellent position.”

We have Rush----yeas, that Rush---promoting O’Malley (??????) Sort of.



So here's O'Malley. He lands at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and there's a media contingent there. He has arrived to save the day. End of story. It doesn't matter what he does, doesn't matter if he succeeds. He cared. He dropped everything. He was in a bar having a nice Irish whisky with some friends and he put it down. He got on that plane and he immediately flew home to Maryland to save the day. End of story. Nothing ever gets solved. That's the point. That's why I started out the program talking about the benefits of age.

Why were the GOP talking heads talking up a liberal ideals Democratic Candidate? Because they needed someone to attack Clinton from the left. But then, heaven dropped an even better candidate in their laps, Socialist Bernie Sanders, the man who has many more general election vulnerabilities (he is a Socialist!) than life-long Democrat O’Malley. And suddenly, O’Malley was forgotten—by the right wing.

Members of the left have not forgotten. Here is a write up in the Chicago Tribune:



His lines about redeeming the American Dream and promoting a stronger middle class are standard fare. His selling point was: "I am the only candidate for president with 15 years of executive experience." He stands out, he said, for turning "progressive values into action." This was where his earnest speech became impassioned, his voice rising over building cheers: "In Baltimore, we took action to save lives by reducing record-high violence to record lows. We increased drug treatment to free thousands of our courageous neighbors from the scourge of drug addiction. ... Driver's licenses for new American immigrants, marriage equality and a ban on assault weapons: and we didn't just talk about it, we actually got it done!"

Here is the speech that got the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman so excited.

http://www.c-span.org/...

So, how is the press covering the campaign? Check out NYT’s “Politics” section today and you will find 1) one article about Sanders getting a new endorsement 2) two articles about Clinton’s emails 3) a whole bunch of articles about various GOP candidates and nothing—as in nada—about O’Malley. Search his name at the Times and you find most of the recent coverage is about his efforts to get more Democratic primary debates—presumably to get more coverage, since the press is not going to cover him. Oh, wait. Correction---the NYT prominently covered his recent criticism of Obama’s decision to allow only 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country. He wants us to do more. The NYT wants to make sure that its readers know that he wants him to bring over more. Presumably because the staff at the NYT knows how popular Muslim refugees are in NYC at this time.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

The Washington Post keeps harping on O’Malley’s income and debts. As in this piece:



The appearance of a quid pro quo is not the biggest problem facing Mr. O’Malley, who remains stuck near zero in the polls among Democratic primary voters. Still, the payment — his single largest chunk of current income — while not illegal, is troubling.

ww.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/16/omalley-discloses-heavy-debt-paid-speeches-as-he-runs-for-president/

The Washington Post cannot get enough of the O’Malley’s finances, seeking simultaneously to portray them as spendthrift (for attempting to send their kids through school) AND as broke AND as highly paid AND as penny pinchers. Quite a rhetorical juggling feat by the reporter assigned to cover O’Malley(with slime), John Wagner---and one that reminds me a lot of the WaPo’s series of John Solomon authored articles about John Edwards which the newspaper used to torpedo the Edwards campaign in early 2007.

Here, we have Furniture-gate, the WaPo’s attempt to portray as sinister the O’Malley’s decision to purchase used furniture from the governor’s mansion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...



A decision by former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley to purchase furniture from the governor’s mansion is creating some headaches back home -- including criticism from his Republican successor -- as he campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination.

When O’Malley and his family moved out of the mansion in January, they took dozens of items with them that his administration deemed “excess property,” according to state records. As first reported over the weekend by the Baltimore Sun, the family paid $9,638 for beds, chairs, desks, lamps, mirrors and other items from the mansion’s living quarters that originally cost taxpayers $62,000. Many of the pieces were eight years old or more, and they were discounted by administration officials to reflect their age.

While Clinton and Sanders draw headlines, O’Malley is quietly courting voters here in the country’s first caucus state, going “town to town to town, the old-fashioned way.”

His campaign — which raised $2 million last quarter, compared with Clinton’s $47 million and Sanders’s $15 million — is focusing much of its limited resources on Iowa, hoping a strong showing will catapult O’Malley forward.

Sorry, O’Malley. I suspect that a second or even first place finish in Iowa will be declared by the press as the end of your campaign—as it was for John Edwards. The mainstream media does not want you in this race. The RNC does not want you in this race. Maybe back in the spring, when there was no one to challenge Clinton from the left. But now they have someone much more controversial, someone much easier to attack in the general. You are just too god damned electable. And too scary. Because you do not accept the old Wall Street truism that there is an ideal level of unemployment or that poverty is good for business. You should just give up and go back to your overpriced house with your cheap, used furniture---

Or maybe not. Here is John Nichols writing for The Nation:



O’Malley embraces elements of a Catholic social-justice ethic that will be highlighted as Pope Francis tours the United States this year. The governor is often at his best when he speaks of a duty to address poverty and inequality, and of the need to respect the dignity of work with living-wage pay and workplace fairness. As governor, he acted on these values by, for instance, making Maryland the first state in the nation to require government contractors to pay their employees a living wage and arguing passionately and practically for raising the state’s minimum wage to $10,10 an hour. That does not mean that O’Malley marches in lockstep with the church; he is pro-choice and he has been a leading advocate of marriage equality; when Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien urged the governor to oppose marriage equality, O’Malley replied, “I do not presume, nor would I ever presume as governor, to question or infringe upon your freedom to define, to preach about, and to administer the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. But on the public issue of granting equal civil marital rights to same-sex couples, you and I disagree.” O’Malley signed the law and then defended it when opponents sought unsuccessfully to overturn the measure with a statewide referendum.

And now, more Martin O’Malley, from New Hampshire. If you get bored easily, speed ahead to around minute 18, when the candidate gets really fired up:

https://www.youtube.com/...

Driver’s licenses for immigrants, ban on assault weapons, gay marriage rights, the Dream Act…sounds like the man knows how to get things done. “Growing injustice.” “Leaving the majority of our people behind.” “Our economy is not money. It is people. It is all our people.” “No American family that works hard and plays by the rules should raise their children in poverty.” “We must make it easier for workers to join labor unions.” “We must advance the cause of equal pay for work.” “When women succeed, America succeeds.” “The enduring symbol of our nation is not, Donald Trump, the barbed wire fence. It is the Statue of Liberty.” “Stop giving a free pass to the bullies of Wall Street to run rough shod over the American people.”

Hmm. Does not sound like a man who is ready to give up, no matter how many nails the corporate media tries to drive into the coffin of his presidential campaign. Miracles happen sometime. Maybe St. Martin (of the Poor) O'Malley will show us one.