Pocket of big banks

O’Malley rails against Wall Street in New Hampshire

By Jonathan Easley

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) struck a populist tone on a swing through New Hampshire on Tuesday, arguing Republicans are in the pocket of big banks while Democrats are intimidated by them.

Speaking in Bedford, N.H., at the New England Council’s Politics and Eggs gathering, a fired-up O’Malley railed against the “powerful and wealthy special interests” whose prerogative he said “threatens the national interest, threatens the national economy, and threatens to wreck the homes, the livelihoods and the hopes of Americans.”

“I was on the front lines, and so were you,” O’Malley declared. “The activity that took place on Wall Street and led to this crash might have happened far from our states, but the damage happened in every neighborhood. Millions of jobs. Millions of homes. And instead of following through on the reforms that the American people expected of us, we backed off.”

“It seems like one party is entirely owned by big money, and the other party is nearly intimidated by it, and people expect better,” he continued. “They expect better. People play by the rules and work hard, and they expect Wall Street to play by the rules, and they expect the government to be on their side and stand up for us, stand up for our national interests.”

O’Malley is mulling a run for the White House. He has been laying the groundwork for some time now, and recently begun ramping up his media profile and visits to early-voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa.

He’s even become the first potential Democratic contender to take a swipe at front-runner Hillary Clinton. On Sunday, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” O’Malley dismissed the notion that any candidate was “inevitable” and argued, “the presidency of the United States is not some crown to be passed between two families.”

Still O'Malley remains buried in the polls. The latest CNN/ORC poll from mid-March showed Clinton in first place among the likely Democratic field at 62 percent, followed by Vice President Biden at 15 percent, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) at 10 percent and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at 3 percent, with O’Malley pulling up the rear at 1 percent support.

However, some Democrats believe Clinton could be vulnerable to a populist threat from the left. Some progressives have been clamoring for Warren to run, believing that Clinton’s close ties to the banking industry are misrepresentative of liberal ideals.

O’Malley’s message Tuesday seemed geared toward what has become the Warren wing of the party.

“Wages in America for the vast majority of moms and dads and their families have been going down for the last 12 years, not up,” O’Malley said. “And until wages start going up, until we make the American dream true around the kitchen tables of America, we can’t let up. We have to continue to look for answers to solve this problem.”

O’Malley pushed a litany of liberal reforms at the event, arguing in favor of expanding Social Security, raising the minimum wage and lowering the threshold for overtime pay.

“There’s a despondency out there; there’s a darkness that has crawled deep inside the soul of our country, and we need to acknowledge it, and hold it up and reject it for what it is,” he said.

“To these headline writers and pundits who would declare a premature obituary for the American dream, we must all say, not on our watch, not on our watch. We have better choices to make, and we still have time to be the great Americans our parents and our grandparents were, but we’re going to have to make the choices that are consistent with the truth of how our economy works.”