O'Say Can You See PAC

"Belief" +
3:33 video from Nov. 16, 2013.

Female Police/EMS Dispatcher: ...I copy, shots fired on Mission just south of the off-ramp of the 15.

[Portentious Music]

Male Announcer: It's hard to know where dreams end, but we know where this one began.  Baltimore in the late 1990s.  For many in the city back then a cauldron of crime, drugs and profound despair.

So one city councilman ran for mayor by walking its mean streets.  Maybe it was right here at the intersection of Park Heights and Belvedere where the intersection between what was and what could be took hold. 

Assaulted by batteries and bottles hurled by drug dealers angered at having their business interrupted, Mayor O'Malley formulated an assault on hopelessness.  He didn't make a campaign promise to make the city safer, he made a pledge and he kept it.

[Music up tempo]  Mayor O'Malley implements a data-driven initiative called CitiStat, because you need to konw where the problem is before you can fix it, and things that get measured...are things that get done.

After two terms, crime was driven down—the greatest 10-year reduction in any major U.S. city.  Drug overdoese were driven down, racial tension was down, and for most families in the city things were finally looking up.

And this belief began formulating inside Mayor O'Malley, if it was possible to turn things around in Maryland's most troubled city, why not Maryland itself, a state that had a $1.7 billion structural deficit and some severly underperforming schools.  If CitiStat helped O'Malley change a city, couldn't StateStat help change a state? 

Because each statistic told a story, about a child needing a better education, a new father needing a job, a state worker needing pension security, and a community needing neighborhood security. 

And in 2007 Mayor O'Malley became Governor O'Malley and things that were measured did get done and the things that were done got measured.

Maryland became number one in education five years in a row, number one in holding down the cost of college tuition, number one in innovation and entrepreneurship, number one in research and development, number one in median family income, with a certain public official named number one in the nation.

And as StateStat was transforming a state, BayStat was transforming the Chesapeake Bay, halting decades of decline from pollution, sewage and runoff, and making it a healthier place for blue crabs, oysters and the numerous fishermen, restaurants and people that depend on them. 

And because O'Malley believes in the dignity of every individual, he transformed a few other things, allowing two people who happen to be the same sex to join in the same union everyone else can, and giving new Americans a chance to dream the same dreams as every American by giving them the opportunity for a college education.

And while he was cutting statewide pollution, crime and illegal guns, he was cutting the cost of statewide government.  Because sometime you need to prune in the present to foster growth in the future.

Way back when, Martin O'Malley forged a belief while walking the streets of Baltimore, and a belief that changed a city, changed a state, and changed more than a few lives along the way.

Notes: This video introduced Gov. O'Malley before his speech at the New Hampshire Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner at the Expo Center at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester on the evening of Nov. 16, 2013.