Sunday News Roundup

The Washington Post endorsed Rushern Baker over incumbent Jack Johnson for Prince George's County Executive:

JACK B. JOHNSON, the Prince George's county executive, who is running for a second four-year term, is a tireless campaigner and a nimble politician; he is much less interested in governing. That's too bad, because he leads an enormous, diverse county whose vast potential is imperiled by the double-edged threat of poor schools and pervasive crime. Yet despite those challenges, his ambitions and achievements over four years in office have been strikingly modest.

However, I suspect that the Post's writ runs less strongly in Prince George's than it does in Montgomery so I am not sure how badly injured Johnson is by the endorsement which can be portrayed, correctly, as that of the white establishment.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Ike Leggett and Steve Silverman are beginning to take the gloves off in their race for Montgomery County Executive. In a rather tired story, they report the standard tropes of this campaign: that Silverman is beholden to developers and Leggett is a flip-flopper.

However, another Washington Post story nicely shows why Gov. Bob Ehrlich's attacks on the state of Baltimore City's schools under Mayor Martin O'Malley is bound to fail. O'Malley can always respond by referring to his strong support from Maryland's teachers. Indeed, Baltimore's teachers seem to view Ehrlich's attack on their schools as an attack on them. The Ehrlich's administration's attack on school funding early in his term, which he began to reverse far from coincidentally just as this year's election approached, make him a far from credible education governor.

Finally, the Washington Post reports that, like Montgomery's candidates for county executive, Ehrlich is being forced to deal with questions about affordable housing and the cost of growth. One cannot help but wonder if we will elect a bunch of anti-growth officials just in time for growth to grind to a halt, as it did in Fairfax after the election of Audrey Moore.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun reports that Ehrlich is still chasing slots for Maryland, his pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow:

"I anticipate a school construction budget that will create 21st- century places of learning with the resources necessary to reach every student in the state and a funding source that will pay for it that will pass next year," he said.

A top administration official confirmed that the governor was referring to slots.

Of course, slots only highlights Ehrlich's incompetence as governor. Maryland's governor is arguably the most powerful in the nation. Ehrlich had a strong ally in Senate President Mike Miller. Yet, Ehrlich couldn't get the deal done. At the same time, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner could arrange a tax increase to pay for education with the implacably anti-tax Republican legislature of the Old Dominion even though Virginia's governor is much weaker. And we seemed to have managed without the money.