Public Comment

For many Democrats, Hillary's politics are too embedded with Wall Street, while Bernie seems too independent to be electable. I recently discovered the candidate whose progressive politics are coupled with a proven ability to govern. Maryland's former Governor Martin O'Malley, also former Mayor of Baltimore, has the managerial experience and technical vision to apply information technology to make governmental decisions based on knowledge. He applied the same mapping technology we use when finding a route through traffic, to identify where Baltimore's worst crime was, and he allocated increased resources to those neighborhoods to fight the city's crime problems.  

O'Malley initiated a management innovation he called CityStat to monitor progress and hold city staff accountable. I met him at a conference about Geographic Information Systems, and I asked him how he handled the potential rivalry between the City's district managers when the more needy districts received more funding. With a twinkle in his eye, he said, "I moved my best managers into those districts." He made every manager's statistics available for all to see. Those who were accomplishing the City's goals were acknowledged, and those who were just marking time "were encouraged to update their resumes." 

With knowledge-based decision-making and O'Malley's managerial savvy, Baltimore's violent crime reduced by 41%. As governor, he applied similar methods, called StateStat, to reduce Maryland's unemployment and increase jobs faster than its neighboring states that had cut their budgets for necessary services. He promotes a new way of managing to get things done, moving from innovation-limiting hierarchy to collaborative consensus-building. 

The ability to manage well could be dangerous unless applied to worthy objectives. O'Malley's top goals are to reverse the causes of climate change by supporting clean, renewable power sources; to limit the influence of unaccountable big money in our political system; and to reduce the disparity of wealth and opportunity with affordable education, fair taxation, big-bank regulation and resistance to trade deals that threaten our environmental, labor, and health protections.  

Americans are tired of seeing clowns run around the circus car when we need a President who knows how to work effectively for the shared concern of our survival on this planet. Now, we have Martin O'Malley to consider for the job. 

O'Malley is the candidate with Bernie's progressive politics and Hillary's political savvy (minus her baggage), who actually knows how to manage government to repair our most severe problems. Discover him yourself at martinomalley.com.