Repost for sanity:James Fallows Discussion With Martin O'Malley: Reform, or Pitchforks?
(Video) Thanks to bigtree.
A few viewer's / interviewer's notes:
• This was less a casual discussion, and more a formal "please explain yourself" interrogation, than it might have been—if O'Malley's record as crime-fighting mayor of Baltimore, and his emphasis on by-the-numbers reporting of police activities along with other government actions, hadn't recently come into the center of the news. That is the topic on which we start.
• On police violence: I asked O'Malley about the seemingly nonstop stream of videos showing mainly white law enforcement officers shooting, choking to death, manhandling, or otherwise mistreating unarmed black male civilians. What was going on here? Was more of this happening? Or were we just seeing more? O'Malley's answer boiled down to: real occurrence slightly going down, visibility going way up. Which he says, despite short-term complications, is good.
• The meat of the discussion involved O'Malley's views on inequality, polarization, thwarted opportunity, and overall Second Gilded Age-ism. He was preaching to the choir, as far as my own views are concerned, but you can hear the way he develops these themes after the Baltimore discussion.
• Starting around 24:00, I remind O'Malley of a moment he might have forgotten but I never will. (And it reflects well on him.) It involves his against-the-grain real-world cautions on the eve of the Iraq war.
• For his part O'Malley was careful to make no "normal" political points and to release no personal barbs. But he had a very interesting "new day is coming" theme, about the way younger Americans are tired of feeling divided and pessimistic, are excited about living in cities and working on the environment, and generally feel better about life than their sour Baby Boomer elders. He's in a mid-generational position to make this point—some 15 years younger than Hillary Clinton, the same age as Rand Paul, 7 or 8 years older than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz—but he makes it skillfully. The hope of moving past old division is evergreen in American politics (remember Andrew Sullivan's "Goodbye to All That" case for Obama in the Atlantic in 2007). It's central to O'Malley's argument.
read: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/talking-with-martin-omalley-reform-or-pitchforks/392633/
**watch full Redland interview with Martin O'Malley**: http://videoembed.esri.com/iframe/4522/000000/width/480/0/00:00:00
