As the former Maryland governor, Martin O’Malley, prepared to announce his intention to run for president in 2016 he has stated that his age and modern outlook will allow him to take the upperhand in a race against fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. O'Malley will make a formal announcement this Saturday, May 30.
Speaking in Ireland, the 52-year-old Irish American said his relative youth and focus on what’s good for the country means that he could be tough competition for the Clinton campaign.
O’Malley said that the challenges facing the world in the second decade of the 21st century are different from those which faced us as the end of the last decade.
He said, “Times change and new times require new thinking and new perspective and new questions too."
He told the Irish Times, “An election, especially an election as important as the election of the next President of the United States, is not about what’s good for the Clintons or for that matter what’s good for the O’Malleys. It’s about what’s good for our country.”
He continued, referring to Hillary Clinton who is 67 years old, “I don’t see myself as to the left or right of the other candidates in the party. I see myself as forward of them. I’m younger than they are. I therefore arrive at some conclusions on important issues in advance of the other candidates.”
“It’s been my experience in helping and mentoring and sharing best practices with other mayors and other governors that new leaders have a lot easier time embracing new ways than old leaders who oftentimes feel that they have to defend old decisions or old legacies rather than being open to new possibilities.
“That’s been my experience with mayors and governors.”
Interviewers asked him about that fact that the Clintons' campaign seems unstoppable, according to recent polls. However, O’Malley said, “Every year there’s an unstoppable candidacy. Inevitable frontrunners are inevitable right up until they’re no longer inevitable.”
He also said the Republican Party tend to “retread old names” but the Democrats look to the future more.
O’Malley said, “In our party, there usually emerges a choice between the candidate that everybody knows and the new candidate of a new generation that none of us has ever really heard of much.
The Maryland politician spoke to reporters while visiting for a DTZ Sherry FitzGerald event. O’Malley’s paternal great-grandfather left the Maam Valley, in Connemara, in the 1880s. He is distantly related to Aidan Gavin, managing director of DTZ Sherry FitzGerald. His visit to Ireland had been postponed last month due to civil unrest in Baltimore.
O’Malley was Mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007. He was recently criticized by the creator and writer of the crime drama “The Wire” David Simon. O’Malley was the inspiration for the the crime-busting mayor character Tommy Carcetti (played by Aidan Gillen).
Simon said O’Malley’s zero-tolerance approach to crime also involved manipulating statistics to show a sharp drop and created a police culture of mass arrests.
O’Malley responded by saying, “I didn’t have the luxury of being able to hold on to an ideology when I was elected mayor. I had to save lives and turn my city around. So I did the things that worked.”
Speaking about United States foreign policy, O’Malley said he hoped that a more collaborative approach could be crafted by like-minded people around the world.
“A fresh perspective is needed to construct a national security strategy that makes a break with the old cold war way of looking at the world and instead puts the reduction of threats at the center of the matrix here and is willing to join and form new alliances in order to mitigate these threats before the only options left to us are military,” said O’Malley.
He also commended Ireland’s positive result in the Marriage Equality referendum and said that the Irish people have never been threatened by other cultures. He said, “This is the country you’ve always been.”
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