Mugger: Russ Smith on Maryland

Book Review - A Baltimore Walkabout - Charm City by Madison Smartt Bell

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:07:00 +0000

Along the waterfront of an East Baltimore neighborhood called Fells Point is a locally renowned pub called the Cat's Eye. A couple of hundred years ago, Fells Point was the home of a thriving shipyard, but over time the area followed the familiar urban pattern of long dereliction, bohemian homesteading and then upscale gentrification. Novelist Madison Smartt Bell, a Cat's Eye habitué and Baltimore resident for more than two decades, has seen the Fells Point transition from artsy hangout to real-estate-investment haven -- a development that he doesn't seem to approve of. But he retains his affection for the pub, especially its live music, and so it was a natural stop for him in "Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore."

The book was commissioned as part of the Crown Journeys series of titles devoted to walking tours of disparate locales, most of them in the U.S. -- a plum sort of writerly assignment. (Mr. Bell's good fortune continues; on Wednesday he landed a $250,000 Strauss Living award, given every five years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.) When he walks along to the Cat's Eye in the Fells Point chapter, it is a wintry Sunday afternoon. Mr. Bell, an amateur guitarist, wants to have a pint of beer and watch his friend Steve Kraemer, a pianist who plays with a group called the Bluesicians.

"Rest assured you won't hear any of that Same Old Blues Crap here," Mr. Bell writes, "Kraemer's somewhat obsessive intelligence is always on the prowl for unusual material and interesting ways to play it." Mr. Bell, a middle-aged Boomer, is, to his dismay, joined at the bar by a young man, zonked on this or that drink or drug, who's wearing "an oversized ultra-ugly heavy metal T-shirt, with heads of rotting corpses screened in orange over black." The kid forces the writer to endure a tale of woe: He lost his girlfriend's car, which he left unlocked. As he becomes more incoherent and distraught, and remains oblivious to the music -- which, of course, offers just the sort of tonic a sad soul needs -- Mr. Bell's annoyance grows, but he finally hands over five dollars and watches the guy disappear into the evening and cobblestone streets of Fells Point.

The anecdote has a nice, rambling quality that is entirely in keeping with this largely delightful and informative book -- in the Fells Point chapter, we get the Cat's Eye experience but also a potted history of this section of Baltimore, starting from the time the "swampy promontory" was purchased by "a Quaker ship's carpenter named William Fell" in 1730. Mr. Bell, who teaches creative writing at Goucher College in the Baltimore suburb of Towson, Md., and has published a bevy of novels since his 1984 debut, "Washington Square Ensemble," is an able storyteller. We gladly tag along with him and various friends of his as they explore this grand old city's neighborhoods, obscure restaurants and architectural curiosities. He provides plenty of background about Baltimore as a onetime bustling hub of shipping and manufacturing.

But Mr. Bell is most interesting when he explains, in entertaining and roundabout ways, his affection for a quirky town that over the years has had many nicknames ("Monumental City," "Mobtown," "Crabtown"), with "Charm City" among the more recent. "Some people assume and believe that Baltimore was already called 'Charm City' back in the days when H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe walked this patch of earth. Not so," Mr. Bell writes, going on to explain that the term was a hapless attempt to attract tourists to Baltimore in the 1970s, a time when the city was not looking its best.

"The charm offensive opened in July 1974, ten days into a garbage collection strike that left mounds of stinking rubbish all over the streets." The strike soon spread to many municipal workers, including zookeepers and "a sizable chunk of the Baltimore police force," Mr. Bell says. A spasm of looting and arson broke out, leading to oft-repeated tales of how larger carnivores at the zoo began eating smaller animals. "But wait. This episode, with all its grotesque irony, alongside the outcome that the zoo animals didn't really eat each other and not too many people really got hurt, turns into a classic Baltimore thing. Weird, sometimes disturbingly so, but once you had come out safe on the far side of it, maybe kinda wonderful, too."

In Mr. Bell's review of Baltimore's many nicknames, he mentions one, "Tinytown," that he accurately credits to City Paper, the alternative weekly I co-founded in Baltimore in 1977. I had come to the city in 1973 to attend Johns Hopkins University and stayed 14 years. After selling the paper, I moved away but returned in 2003 with my wife and two sons. So the years I've lived in the city roughly overlap with much of the time Mr. Bell has been there, and I naturally have a few quibbles with some of his assessments of the place we've both gladly adopted as home. For instance, he mentions many times how expensive housing and private schools in Baltimore have become in the past decade, a view certainly not shared by anyone who lives in nearby Washington, where the prices are stratospheric.

Yet Mr. Bell's griping is actually an encouraging sign: His reverse there-goes-the-neighborhood complaints about an influx of new money is testimony to the fact that Baltimore may finally be experiencing a sustained revival. Now that would be charming.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:29:00 +0000

With 'Sgt. Pepper,' the Beatles indulged their whims -- and changed rock forever

It's possible for two reasonable adults, probably older than 45, to argue for hours about the most significant pop music event of the 1960s. My own vote would be cast in favor of the Beatles' first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in February 1964, but a very close second is the release of their "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the majestic album that will be 40 years old in early June. It's not that "Sgt. Pepper" is my favorite record from that era -- Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" is -- but there's no denying the extraordinary influence that the Beatles' most famous achievement had not only in the music industry but this country's popular culture as well.

"Sgt. Pepper," the group's first album that wasn't supported by a world-wide tour, captured, to use a word that didn't become a cliché for years afterward, the "zeitgeist" then, impeccably in sync with the "Summer of Love," "flower power," psychedelia and the youthful lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. That the Beatles, weary of avoiding hordes of fans and tabloid reporters, abandoned live concerts was in itself a radical shift of gears, but spending more than four months in a recording studio on a single project, and a "concept" album at that, was unheard of. Revisionists today, when critiquing the Beatles' discography, aren't quite as rapturous about "Sgt. Pepper" as millions of fans were in 1967, but the immediate impact of the album can't be overstated.

When "Sgt. Pepper" appeared, it was as if a massive block party had appeared outside your window. I was nearly 12 years old at the time and when one of my four older brothers came home with the highly anticipated new Beatles record, we listened to it over and over, marveling at the sheer audacity of songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Doug, overwhelmed by enthusiasm and hyperbole, declared, matter-of-factly, "The band has changed its name forever and rock 'n' roll will never be the same."

And it wasn't just the music. The album cover itself was breathtaking, a puzzling and colorful collage by Peter Blake that showed the band, in gaudy mock-military costumes, presiding over the burial of the "old" Beatles, with scattered mug shots of high and low cultural icons hovering in the background. You'd go cross-eyed trying to figure out just how many notables were depicted -- a mass of pop art that included Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, Marlene Dietrich, Sonny Liston, Laurel and Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Marlon Brando, Leo Gorcey, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce and Mae West.

The presentation was a triumph of packaging, and included for the first time the printing of lyrics on the back cover. That the group had reached this point a mere three years after the first rush of "Beatlemania" was astonishing, and the songs simply ratcheted up the sense of momentousness provided by the record sleeve.

Relieved from the pressure of performing live, the Beatles were able to record songs that were, even in a relatively primitive studio, filled with overdubs, backward tape loops, snippets of orchestral crescendos, a cowbell here, a tin horn there, creating a sound and style that was quickly, for better or worse, aped by the band's peers and imitators. Aside from the technical innovations, the 13 songs ushered in yet another phase for the Beatles, one that was far more introspective, grandiose and certainly informed by their recreational use of drugs.

Forty years later, it's easy to dismiss such lyrically slight songs as Mr. McCartney's "When I'm Sixty-Four" or George Harrison's meandering, sitar-driven "Within You Without You," but the bulk of "Sgt. Pepper" stands the test of time. For example, John Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" is about an evening vaudeville romp where "Henry the Horse dances the waltz" and men leap through "a hogshead of real fire!" Another standout is Mr. McCartney's "Fixing a Hole," a dreamy and druggy meditation about fame and drudgery. He sings about "filling the cracks" in his door that "kept [his] mind from wandering," and chastises those who "disagree and never win and wonder why they don't get in my door."

It's not exactly T.S. Eliot, as some said at the time, but it's a long way from "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

On one point there is almost universal agreement: "A Day in the Life," a five-minute Lennon-McCartney collaboration that concludes "Sgt. Pepper," is the group's most accomplished song. Combining references to British current events and the narrator's utter boredom with urban routines, the song endorses the notion of dropping out of society, as Mr. Lennon sings, dreamily, "I'd love to turn you on."

Although "Sgt. Pepper" received almost unanimous raves when it was released, a significant dissident was Richard Goldstein, who panned the album in the June 18, 1967, New York Times. Mr. Goldstein, roundly pilloried after the review was published, complained the new release was "busy, hip and cluttered." He concludes: "We need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions. And they need us."

As was soon evident, however, the Beatles didn't "need us," and, in fact, didn't need each other. The group disbanded just three years later. Mr. Goldstein was partially correct in saying that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was "precious," but 40 years later I can't think of a single album that was more influential in changing the way that lyricists, producers and fans went about making and consuming popular music.

It's said that Mr. McCartney in particular was inspired by the Beach Boys' 1966 landmark album "Pet Sounds," in which leader Brian Wilson labored in the studio to create a unified set of songs that challenged the listener -- and his competitors -- with its musical complexity. But it was the Beatles, so popular and wealthy that their record label had to cater to what were considered "whims," who topped Mr. Wilson (artistically and commercially) with "Sgt. Pepper." It was no longer a given that a rock/pop group would dash off an album as quickly as possible to minimize cost, and talented young men began to exert more control over studio production, a process of increased sophistication. The release of "Sgt. Pepper" marked the shift of power in the music industry -- not all that dissimilar to the advent of free agency in Major League Baseball -- from the "suits" to the stars, and to this day the balance hasn't changed.

"Global Warming" is a "No Strings Attached" Issue"

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Like the vast majority of people with strong political opinions, I'm not a scientist, and so it's difficult to sort through the ever-increasing jumble of facts, dire predictions, and reactionary dismissals on the topic of global warming and climate change. This isn't an excuse, it's just extraordinarily difficult to process so much information (and tossed-off punditry) on the subject and arrive at a reasonably intelligent viewpoint. On the one hand, it stands to reason that as the planet's population skyrockets and formerly agrarian countries like China and India become industrial behemoths, the finite amount of natural resources is bound to be affected and pollution increased; on the other hand, whether environmental catastrophe is right around the corner or won't occur for hundreds, or even thousands, of years hasn't been answered to this layman's satisfaction.

One thing I'm quite sure of is that the weather hasn't changed as dramatically in the past generation as the sloganeers and disciples of Al Gore would have you believe. Sure, in today's hyper-technological world, it's far easier to track patterns of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornados, and the melting of glaciers than even 50 years ago, but had that information been available to scientists back then, it's likely a similar pastiche of doomsday scenarios and status quo reports would've been produced.

Just this year, the "End is Near" crowd was agog on the East Coast as mild temperatures in the dead of winter held steady for several weeks. Conversely, the month of April was brutally cold and stormy. I'm betting it won't happen again in 2008. Besides, unpredictable weather didn't coincide with the launch of, say, YouTube. One weekend in early May 1968, for example, while on an overnight hike in the Adirondacks, my progress was hindered by a blinding snowstorm, a crazy fluke of nature that didn't make for a very pleasant time. Likewise, living on Long Island as a youth, hurricanes came and went, some worse than others, but there was no institute giving advance notice of how many storms would occur in a given year.

Granted, there are thousands of brilliant men and women in the United States who have dedicated their careers to educating the masses about the potential for an environmental Armageddon, but what's galling to me is the exponentially larger number of people, often wealthy celebrities and politicians, who've jumped on global-warming bandwagon as a recreational activity. Some, often the same partisans who bleat that today's economy resembles that of the Gilded Age or even the Great Depression, blame Republicans in general, and George W. Bush in particular, for failing to realize that California is about to be swallowed by the Pacific.

Pardon the flippancy, but I can't point the finger at Hillary Clinton or John Edwards--two Democrats whose policies I find quite objectionable--for modern problems I'm familiar with, such as the refusal of kids to read more than two or three books a year or the fact that a majority of Americans can't identify more than one or two Supreme Court Justices.

Thomas Sowell, the syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, had a beaut of a line in the May 3 Sun: "'Global warming' seems to be joining 'diversity,' 'gun control,' 'open space,' and a growing list of other subjects where rational discussion has become impossible--and where you are considered a bad person even for wanting to discuss it rationally... That is what environmentalism--and much else on the political left's agenda--is really all about, self-congratulation."

An item last week in the New York Post's Page Six provided an apt example of the mind-boggling hypocrisy that's rampant among the liberal elite today. It seems that Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair (which published a "green" issue last month), had a publicity problem because of the traffic-blocking limos that wait outside for luminaries at his exclusive Waverly Inn restaurant. According to the paper, on the last weekend of April an ambulance rushing to nearby St. Vincent's Hospital was delayed for five minutes because of the crush of double-parked luxury cars. If Carter's friends are so concerned about the environment, why aren't they taking mass transit to their clubhouse? Stories about celebrities who appear at environmental rallies and then take off to exotic spots via private jets are well known; and how smart is it to build mansions on the cliffs of Malibu, which can't help the cyclical pattern of fires and mud slides in that scenic part of Los Angeles?

It's not my intention at all to demean those who are conducting invaluable research about environmental concerns and the threat to humanity, but it seems to me that currently there are more pressing concerns than daisies blooming in March instead of April. What about the future of Social Security in the United States, a nearly bankrupt entitlement that will drastically affect the economic status of millions starting in just a decade unless the program is reformed? Or the ongoing battle between those who'd like to deport all illegal aliens and those who believe that the country's tradition, not to mention economy, is imperiled by the xenophobes who'd isolate America from the rest of the world? And while Bush is leaving office soon, terrorism won't go away.

Perhaps it's selfish, but right now I'm more worried about the future of my children and grandchildren than how global warming might affect descendants two centuries from now.

Today is the Best Time to Grow Up

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:53:00 +0000

Two columns, on completely different subjects, were published last week and I’m not sure which one left me feeling more vexed or at least confused. The writers in question: The Sun’s Rick Maese, about the Orioles’ continuing attendance woes at Camden Yards; and The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, worrying that “We are scaring our children to death.”

Let’s consider Maese first since baseball, whether as a participant or spectator, is a lot more fun than looking at another picture of Cho Seung-hui, and silly insults aimed at an entire city are easier to slough off from a sportswriter than a mass-audience personality like Garrison Keillor, Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart. Maese’s April 25 column had good intentions, essentially pointing out that when the Red Sox (or Yankees) play in Baltimore they bring along a large fan base and, as supply-side economics would suggest, the residual business to the neighboring establishments near the ballpark aren’t insubstantial.

Yet was Maese auditioning for a role in a third-rate comedy club when he opened his piece with these words about Boston fans? “They come to town today wearing their cargo pants and backward ballcaps. They have thick accents, thirsty livers and girlfriends with blond streaks running through their hair. As they do a couple of times a year, these chowder-eating tourists invade Camden Yards as though it were their own, putting their feet on the coffee table and tracking mud onto the carpet.”

Geez, that’s a heap of insults in just one sentence. Who knew, for instance, that Boston tourists were unique in their preference for “cargo pants” and backward ballcaps”? I’ve never seen such attire in Baltimore, where young men and women wear tweed in the winter, seersucker in the summer, and the only acceptable headgear is the boater. And what’s with the crack about “thirsty livers”? That couldn’t be a slur on Irish-Americans, many of whom settle in the Boston area, for certainly that kind of generalization fell out of popular parlance about 50 years ago. If it didn’t require extensive research to figure out who exactly is The Sun’s publisher this month, I’d call and suggest that Denis O’Leary make a visit to the city and escort Maese to sensitivity courses. As for the “blond streaks” putdown, I guess signifying the “white trash” element common in Sox fans, a touchy person might call that sexist.
Maese is correct that Sox games are terrific for the O’s bottom line, and in fairness his point, lousy jokes notwithstanding, was that until Peter Angelos can putting a winning team on the field, Red Sox games are an economic boost to the Inner Harbor area. Still, when the boys and I attended the April 25 game there was no evidence of unruly behavior. In fact, in section 16, where we usually sit, there were more O’s fans than cargo pant-wearing drunks from Boston in attendance, a marked difference from last year. I’m at a loss for this early season optimism, especially when O’s manager Sam Perlozzo is still at the helm, but the Baltimore fans who still make it to Camden Yards do seem more cheerful.

Noonan’s April 28 essay was more disturbing because it tackled serious issues that are more consequential than the success or failure of a sports franchise. (Disclosure: I’ve met Noonan several times and she’s a charming and perhaps brilliant woman; in addition, on occasion my op-eds or books reviews have appeared in the Journal’s pages.) But one line in her column really stood out: “I would hate to be a child today.” That opinion is backed up by the contention that kids can’t escape a media culture that’s driven by ratings, circulation and sales figures—hence the ceaseless coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and the bad behavior of celebrities—and politicians of both parties who will say anything, no matter how provocative in order to further their own careers.

Furthermore, Noonan claims that in the 1950s and 60s—with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis—for a child “life didn’t seem menacing and full of dread.” She says it was a “boring era.” This sentiment may be well intentioned, but it’s naive revisionism. Consider just the 20th century in America and it’s easy to find plenty of events that children, if they were inclined, could be terrified of. My parents were adolescents during the Great Depression and began raising a family as the United States entered World War II; their parents grew up at a time when the flu and polio killed or maimed millions and infant mortality was still high. That’s scary stuff that makes a mockery of violent television shows, the acceptance of obscenity in pop culture or apocalyptic predictions of the earth’s demise due to global warming.

As for the 60s, there were the mass murderers Richard Speck and Charles Whitman, political assassinations, racial riots, lynchings, the draft, rednecks beating up hippies, kids overdosing on drugs and increasing alienation between generations. It wasn’t boring.

Noonan says that today affluence buys protection, keeping privileged kids “safe” from “the magazine[s] and the TV and the CD and the radio.” I don’t think any economic segment of youth particularly wants to be sheltered that way, and they clearly aren’t, but her idea that the world is more terrifying than the past doesn’t hold up. I’ve no complaints about the year I was born, but despite the constant concern for “the children” 21st century isn’t at all a bad time to grow up.

Right Field

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:19:00 +0000

Although the spectacle of early presidential politics is often intellectually stimulating, the constant nagging by newspaper editorial boards about the “obscenity” of huge sums of money raised and spent by candidates gets more tiresome every year. Now that it’s clear that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act of 2002—a disgraceful law that violates the First Amendment—has done nothing to decrease the amount of money infiltrating the country’s electoral apparatus, except create loopholes that politicians and special interest groups exploit, isn’t it time to put this issue to rest?
Let’s start with the peculiar practice of publicly funding, at least in part, general presidential elections. When was the last time you checked off the box on an income tax return allowing the government to take $3 to help meet the $85 million given to the Democrat and Republican competing for the White House every fourth November? Even though such donations are voluntary, there’s an implicit notion that those who refrain aren’t quite model citizens. In addition, all the rhetoric about how a fixed limit on funding—in all elections, not just at the national level—evens the competition, at least on the money side, hasn’t convinced me that is a desirable, or democratic, result.
The pure theory of public funding and limits on donations isn’t necessarily bad, focusing on the influence certain wealthy individuals, lobbyists, corporate entities or special interest groups might have on an elected representative, but strict disclosures on the Internet can record all monies collected by candidates and the identities of those disbursing the funds. (The U.S. Senate, to its discredit, has dragged its heels on full Internet disclosure. According to The Washington Post an unidentified senator has blocked Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bill that would require that body of Congress to follow the House, presidential candidates and political action committees to regularly electronically post financial contributions.) For example, there was an interactive guide on the New York Times website last week in which a reader could type in a zip code and find all the contributors from the specific part of the country, how much they gave and to what person. It’s there that I learned my former next-door neighbor in Manhattan, once a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, has shifted allegiances this cycle to Barack Obama, giving the maximum $2300 for the primaries.
The Sun ran an editorial on April 9 decrying the vast amounts of cash already collected by the large field of Democratic and Republican candidates, and despaired that the competition has already been thinned by the necessity of campaigns to dial for dollars. The writer said, “[T]he no-holds-barred competition now under way appears to have effectively narrowed the race to the three best-known candidates in each party, and threatens to drive others out before most voters tune in.” The Sun worries too much that “outsiders” with a message won’t be able to compete. After all, it wasn’t even eight months ago that most Americans hadn’t even heard of Sen. Obama, and now he’s essentially even with Sen. Clinton in the Democratic fundraising totals.
Also, if fringe candidates such as liberal Dennis Kucinich or anti-immigration Republican zealot Tom Tancredo really had a platform that not only donors but political writers and activists were receptive to, the money would be raised, just as it was for the then little-known Howard Dean in 2004.
What, exactly, is the sin in raising enormous amounts of money in the hopes of winning an election? There’s speculation that the 2008 presidential campaign will exceed $1 billion in total expenditures, an amount that on the face of it seems enormous. In reality, take a look at the advertising budgets of the huge corporations that inundate television, newsprint and the Internet with their commercials. Has The Sun, or other leading newspapers called for a moratorium on this spending? Of course not, and for that consumers can be thankful that the First Amendment isn’t threatened when pure commerce is involved.
The New York Times has a fervent editorial stance about the truckloads of money that candidates collect earlier and earlier in the campaign cycle. On April 7, an editorialist gave half-hearted praise to Obama for admitting that he’s “raising obscene amounts of money” and then went on to claim the electorate is disgusted by the current political system. Probably so, but when was that not the case? In an earlier editorial (Jan. 27), the Times indulged in nostalgia, noting that John F. Kennedy didn’t announce his candidacy for the presidency until Jan. 2, 1960. The paper didn’t bother to point out that back in “the old days,” there were no limits to fundraising, which was certainly to the benefit of then-Sen. Kennedy, whose campaign was largely funded by his multimillionaire father and his friends.
It’s also worth remembering that if today’s “reform” were in place in 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy (who relied on a few wealthy benefactors) would have been unable to compete in that year’s primaries, denying the country one of it most serious and historic candidacies. Same goes for Bobby Kennedy, who didn’t enter that year’s race until after McCarthy shocked President Lyndon Johnson with a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary that year.
There’s the fear that money, and the time that candidates devote to trolling for it, has shut out “ideas” in presidential campaigns. That would be news to John Edwards, who has stated flatly that he’d raise taxes to implement national health care; or John McCain, who is defying public opinion polls by staunchly backing the war in Iraq.
The Times has said that elections are conducted today with “warpspeed.” That’s true, but what aspect of modern American life isn’t affected by the vast technological changes that’ve occurred in the past generation?

Maryland's Do-Nothing Left

noreply@blogger.com (citybizlist) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:18:00 +0000

BALTIMORE -- Democrats now enjoy a monopoly on power in this state after Martin O'Malley swept popular Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich from office last year. But despite lots of bluster, the result of the new governor's first legislative session is that the more radical ideas on the agenda simply didn't get done.

Could this be a new model for Democrats? Lots of talk aimed at the party's base, only to be followed by very little substantive action once handed the responsibilities of governing?

Mr. O'Malley, the mayor of this city for seven years, is well known as a flashy, glib personality and a good campaigner. It was expected he'd also nurse along national ambitions by pursuing an ambitious agenda during the 90-day session in Annapolis that ended this week, much as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to immediately put her stamp on Congress.

The most distressing result of Mr. O'Malley's first 90 days, at least to the business community, was the enactment of a "living wage" bill, which will force government contractors to pay employees $11.30 an hour in the urban Baltimore-Washington corridor and $8.30 in rural areas. Maryland is the first state to pass such a stipulation (similar laws do exist in municipalities across the country), and it was seen as a promise fulfilled by Mr. O'Malley to the organized labor groups that supported his campaign.

This measure has led conservatives to fear the worst from an O'Malley administration. One small business owner in Baltimore County told me he expects the "living wage" bill to trigger further government intervention into the private sector, major environmental legislation "to make progressives feel good" and higher taxes to help fund inefficient public schools. Mr. Ehrlich, for his part, now hosts a talk show on a local radio station, and during his first broadcast on March 31 said the new General Assembly is "far left. It's harsh left . . . The Democratic Party has changed in very fundamental ways."

But it's a little hard to find the stamp Mr. O'Malley is putting on Maryland. The restoration of one-party rule in the state -- in 2002 Mr. Ehrlich became the first Republican to win the governor's mansion in more than three decades -- is so far failing to tilt the state sharply left.

Led by an oddly detached governor, Democrats did not enact the juggernaut of tax hikes and anti-business regulations that most fiscal conservatives feared. The General Assembly passed a number of laws that Mr. Ehrlich likely would have vetoed -- such as a statewide smoking ban (some restaurant and bar owners protested, but Maryland is hardly in the forefront of such policy), imposing California's emissions standards on cars sold to state residents, issuing an apology for the state's long-ago participation in the slave trade, and a bill that would require the state's presidential electors to vote for the winner of the nationwide popular vote.

Besides serving Al Gore's ego, however, the latter, for now, is mere political theater. It won't actually take effect until states with at least a total of 270 electoral votes -- enough to win the presidency -- enact the same law. The emission standards also won't kick in for a few years and the living-wage mandates apply only to government contracts -- the living wage is not a statewide increase in the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, left on the cutting room floor were proposals to repeal the death penalty (a pet cause of Mr. O'Malley's), raise the cigarette tax by $1 a pack, provide health benefits for 200,000 uninsured Marylanders and establish a "green fund" to spend on environmental causes in the Chesapeake Bay.

And despite mild criticism from The Baltimore Sun's liberal editorial page, the media are largely letting the governor get away with doing nothing. That suggests he isn't likely to think more boldly in the near future. Another indication of his timidity is that he's bragging about restoring an order of "civility" to Annapolis. "We are not going to repair the divisions of the last four years in the first 90 days [of his administration], but I think we've made a lot of progress," Mr. O'Malley told a Sun reporter this week.

If divided government over the past four years was an issue, however, it wasn't a problem for the state. Mr. Ehrlich often clashed publicly with daunting Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature, but he overcame large budget deficits to preside over a period of tremendous prosperity, punctuated by unemployment consistently below 4%.

It's no secret that Mr. O'Malley, 44, harbors higher electoral ambitions. What he appears to be counting on is that he'll gain a larger office -- say that of vice president -- by thinking small now. He's looking to get a sense of the national mood before committing himself to policy, and wants to be able to lineup behind whoever wins his party's presidential nomination.

However, Mr. O'Malley still faces an obstacle in the form of state Senate President Mike Miller, a 64-year-old veteran legislator. Mr. Miller is a vocal proponent (as was Mr. Ehrlich) of expanded legalized gambling, mostly in the form of racetrack slot machines, which could bring in $800 million annually in taxes. He also supports increasing gasoline, tobacco, income and sales taxes, as well as cutting spending. Mr. Miller, who plans to retire in 2010, has no desire to engage in national politics. If he chooses to clash with Mr. O'Malley, the confrontation will come just as the Democratic presidential nominee is paring names from his (or her) vice presidential list. How inconvenient governing can be.

And Mr. Miller has no shortage of ego. He told The Sun's Jennifer Skalka in an April 8 article that, "I'm a student of Lyndon Johnson. I'm a student of Winston Churchill also. I'm a student of Napoleon. I'm a student of Alexander the Great. I'm a student of Julius Caesar. I'm a student of Douglas MacArthur."

Mr. O'Malley, on the other hand, is a student of former president Bill Clinton, a politician who will pursue the most expedient and fashionable platform to further his own personal goals. The upcoming battle over slot machines -- which House Speaker Michael Busch adamantly opposes -- could land Mr. O'Malley in political quicksand. One job of a vice president is to move tough legislation. If Mr. O'Malley can't do that in a legislature controlled by his own party why would anyone add him to a national ticket? Sometimes even doing nothing has its risks.