September 14, 2006
William Donald Schaefer's 3rd-place finish
William Donald Schaefer donned an admiral's uniform to depart Baltimore's mayoralty for Maryland's governship in 1987. I recall working as a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun the day this story ran.
A friend of mine served as an election judge in Canton at Tuesday's primary. She related the following anecdote:
We had 98-year-old women come in and say, "Will you help me? I only want to vote for Schaefer. None of those other candidates. None of those judges. Wait! I don't see his name! [My friend would help them advance a screen.] Wait I still don't see his name!"They were not satisfied until they pressed the touch screen for Schaefer. "Now I don't want to vote for anyone else!" My friend would say, "Well we still have to press one more button to record your vote." Finally the seniors would depart the voting booth, mission accomplished.
With determined support from those with long memories of Baltimore "before," Schaefer still couldn't finish higher than third. Maryland's new electorate didn't see eye to eye with long-timers who found Schaefer pretty much to the end refreshingly unpackaged and straightforward.
Count myself as one of those (like a 98-year-old lady, but oh well) who were willing to overlook his tantrums. Yes he was egotistical and getting old, but still had his heart in the right place.
His most marvelous feature lately was his complete lack of political correctness. He said rival Janet Owens looked like "Old Mother Hubbard." He called the Eastern Shore a "s---thouse" after it repudiated him in an election (but he still may run for Ocean City mayor yet). He wanted service workers at McDonald's to be able to speak English.
He called Glendening "rabbit brain," as recalled in the fun retrospective in the Washington Post, William Donald Schaefer Always Made a Splash.
Yesterday he recalled as one of the most memorable moments of his career the gratitude of a "little old black lady" who nearly cried at getting her own public housing in Baltimore 30 years ago. It was refreshing somehow to hear a guy just speak out straight, without wondering if his audience preferred the term African-American, or to just duck the issue of color, or to use whatever newfangled neologisms might prevail in 2006.
With Ron Smith being ailing at WBAL radio and the Baltimore Sun chat forums strangely subdued, at first Tuesday's primary defeat of Comptroller William Donald Schaefer felt vastly underplayed in yesterday's media.
The Baltimore Sun finally stepped in today with four articles, which I won't link to directly because Sun links go bad after a bit of time passes. You can look up "Schaefer couldn't leave on his own," by Michael Dresser and M. Dion Thompson, which notes the significance of Schaefer's squabbles with former Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening and closeness to current Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.:
In 2002, Schaefer won re-election and found himself serving on the board with Ehrlich, the first Republican governor in more than three decades.From Ehrlich, Schaefer received the deference and respect he never felt from Glendening. He became a consistent ally and outspoken admirer of the Republican governor.
Schaefer was praised for leading a turnaround of the state's scandal-ridden retirement system, taking over as chairman of the state pension board in the last year of the Glendening administration. Once a laggard in its investment returns, the system has performed strongly over the past three years.
But on the Board of Public Works, Schaefer was still picking fights -- though his targets were groups that made up a large part of the Democratic base, including minorities, women and gays.
Then we have "Remember 'Old Schaefer' for service, compassion," by Dan Rodricks, who captures the heroism of Schaefer after Baltimore burned in the 1968 riots:
A lot of you know what I'm talking about; you remember all those years, the post-riot years, the 1970s and into the 1980s, when Schaefer seemed to be the only one standing, literally, in the middle of abandoned streets to proclaim, "This is a great day for the city of Baltimore."Long before his political identity became murky - remember him going off in a pout to endorse First President Bush in 1992? - here was a classic New Deal Democrat who believed in an essential truth: that government, and those in it, could actually do some good. As a matter of fact, for Schaefer, even with his barge-size ego, that's what marked his career - service to people. It sounds corny, but it's true.
"You have to wonder why some of these people want to run for public office," a friend from Montgomery County said on Election Night while listening to election results on his car radio.
Interesting as these articles are, they do not convey the shock I feel that Willie Don lost his first election in 51 years. The rest of the state I guess doesn't feel the enduring loyalty to a guy that truly tried to rescue Baltimore, with his efforts to create the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards helping to keep Charm City from descending to a potential fate as another Detroit.
When I first arrived at the Baltimore Sun in 1987, Schaefer was in his final year (of 16) as Baltimore mayor. On the copy desk, I would write cutlines for photos of the mayor plunging into the Aquarium or departing the city dressed as an admiral on the Constellation. His showmanship, energy and orientation toward helping the city shone through most everything he did as mayor.
Yesterday, he attacked the press, saying it had no heart when they didn't join the staff applause at his valedictory address. You could hear on air someone saying something like, "We never applaud in these circumstances." But Schaefer had made a point of sorts ... making it clear that he felt that Maryland area journalists often judged rather than reported.
Now what does the third-place finish of Schaefer in the Democratic primary mean? Is it really the political ascendancy of Montgomery County, which has exploded in my lifetime from 165,000 to nearly 1 million residents, while Baltimore has shrunk from just under 1 million to 635,000, to win the Maryland numbers game?
Have a look at the election board's unofficial tally in the comptroller race.
Note that Franchot rolled up his votes in Montgomery, Prince George's, Frederick and Charles counties (full of federal employees, increasingly unionized and politically active) and attracted little support elsewhere, and that Schaefer still ran well in Baltimore city and county and carried most of the Eastern Shore that he once disparaged:
Democratic candidates for Comptroller
Schaefer counties bold, Franchot counties italics, Owens counties regular font
| William | |||
| Peter | Janet S. | Donald | |
| Franchot | Owens | Schaefer | |
| Allegany County | 1,423 | 1,238 | 2,079 |
| Anne Arundel County | 12,486 | 20,041 | 13,659 |
| Baltimore City | 16,308 | 23,878 | 27,878 |
| Baltimore County | 24,148 | 32,021 | 35,746 |
| Calvert County | 1,740 | 2,667 | 1,717 |
| Caroline County | 441 | 864 | 673 |
| Carroll County | 3,135 | 3,662 | 3,528 |
| Cecil County | 1,240 | 1,940 | 1,865 |
| Charles County | 3,773 | 3,250 | 2,958 |
| Dorchester County | 638 | 1,256 | 1,407 |
| Frederick County | 5,079 | 4,292 | 3,372 |
| Garrett County | 326 | 386 | 630 |
| Harford County | 4,983 | 7,207 | 7,152 |
| Howard County | 9,800 | 9,810 | 6,203 |
| Kent County | 793 | 1,125 | 852 |
| Montgomery County | 57,670 | 19,754 | 13,466 |
| Prince George's County | 43,747 | 34,831 | 21,310 |
| Queen Anne's County | 1,056 | 1,645 | 1,253 |
| St. Mary's County | 2,219 | 2,655 | 2,927 |
| Somerset County | 255 | 662 | 903 |
| Talbot County | 961 | 1,325 | 919 |
| Washington County | 2,509 | 2,229 | 3,147 |
| Wicomico County | 1,153 | 2,891 | 2,340 |
| Worcester County | 884 | 1,720 | 2,143 |
| Totals | 196,767 (36.7%) | 181,349 (33.8%) | 158,127 (29.5%) |
As The Sun's Jennifer Skalka writes in "Vote results illustrate power shift to D.C. area:"
Montgomery has long been perceived by residents from other jurisdictions as out of touch, too liberal and, in recent years, too wealthy to produce leaders with a deep understanding of the state's economic and social diversity.But the county's population continues to boom, its steady growth buffered from economic downturns by an influx of federal money.
The Washington Post makes a similar argument in "A New Day for Democrats: D.C. Suburbs Assert Themselves in Party Primaries."
The increasing power of MoCo may not be altogether a bad thing. Baltimore's schools remain such a disaster that outside scrutiny of local bungling can be a good thing.
Is the defeat of a conservative Democrat bad news for Ehrlich, who needs Dem and independent votes to win in November? Or has Franchot won only a plurality of left-leaning Marylanders eligible to vote in a closed primary? And is Franchot a clever campaigner, as is suggested in "Franchot quietly puts together his victory," by Stephanie Desmon, in today's Sun?
We don't know. It's difficult to tell whether Ehrlich will be in double trouble with the growth in Montgomery County and an anti-Republican mood, or if, as Andrew A. Green also writes in The Sun, "Parties part on vote's portent: Democrats see electorate wanting change; GOP sees an opening for Ehrlich:"
Republicans dismissed Tuesday's results as the product of an increasingly liberal Democratic primary electorate, a development they said could make it easier for Ehrlich to paint the party as hard-left in the general election.It's a message the governor has begun delivering. In one of his most effective television ads, a woman who appears to be an Ehrlich supporter tells the camera that the governor leads not from the right or from the left, "but the center, where most of us are."
The three pillars of Ehrlich's electoral success, he has said, are the Republican base, independent voters and conservative Schaefer Democrats - the kind who crossed party lines to vote for President Ronald Reagan and who did it again to elect Ehrlich.
But looking at the primary results, Ehrlich's opponents are betting that the third pillar has weakened and that the governor will have to contend with a less hospitable political landscape than he did four years ago.
Ronald Walters, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park's Leadership Academy, said the governor shouldn't ignore the primary results. The state is not what it was in 2002, he said.
Walters released an analysis this week showing that rather than cutting down on Democrats' voter registration advantage in the wake of Ehrlich's election, Republicans have lost ground in the past four years.
There are 55,000 new Democratic voters in Prince George's County, he said. Turnout figures from the primary suggest their impact has not been felt, but that between their presence and the success of candidates such as Franchot, Ehrlich has reason to be worried for the general election.
"He's got to look at that really hard," Walters said. "This has got to be a wake-up call to him."
Richard Vatz, a professor of political rhetoric at Towson University and a long-time friend of Ehrlich, said it's dangerous to extrapolate too much from the results of this week's election.
Democratic primary voters tend to be significantly more liberal than Democrats who turn out for the general election, he said.
"The initial reaction is 'uh-oh' for Ehrlich, but that doesn't mean it will necessarily turn out in that way," Vatz said. "The result is that we have another left-liberal in the race, and the consequence of that isn't obvious to me."
Hopefully Blair Lee, one of the state's most interesting and straight-shooting political commentators, will also weigh in. Certainly the public will in less than two months.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:13 AM in The Neighborhood
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