POLITICS

Martin O’Malley Announces Presidential Campaign, Pushing Image of Vitality

By MAGGIE HABERMANMAY 30, 2015

Martin O’Malley held hands with his wife, Katie, as they walked on stage to announce his candidacy in Baltimore on Saturday. CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

BALTIMORE — In another campaign year, Martin O’Malley’s résumé and good looks might be irresistible to Democratic primary voters. He is a former big-city mayor whose story of renewal in Baltimore seemed well tailored to an increasingly urban and minority party. He is a former two-term governor of Maryland — and the lead singer and guitarist in a rock ’n’ roll band.

But Mr. O’Malley is running in an election cycle in which Democratic elected officials and donors have overwhelmingly focused attention on Hillary Rodham Clinton. And he already faces competition from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for the support of liberals who dislike Mrs. Clinton or merely want to see her pushed further to the left.

After a two-year exploratory phase, Mr. O’Malley, 52, on Saturday began to make a case for why Democrats should bet on him instead of on Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Sanders. His argument was both economic and, in a clear contrast with his significantly older Democratic rivals, generational.

“Today, the American dream seems for so many of us to be hanging by a thread,” he said, announcing his candidacy before hundreds of supporters under a baking sun in Federal Hill Park in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, with the towers of the city’s downtown behind him.

“This is not the American dream,” he added, as his notes flapped in the breeze. “It does not have to be this way. This generation of Americans still has time to become great. We must save our country now. And we will do that by rebuilding the dream.”

In a speech that gave short shrift to foreign policy, Mr. O’Malley worked hard to tap into resentments rooted in the 2008 financial collapse. “Tell me how it is that you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in our country,” he said, “but if you wreck the nation’s economy, you are untouchable.”

His aides say Mr. O’Malley is a true progressive, one who became involved early on the issue of same-sex marriage, and a scrappy underdog who takes to tough political fights. He staked out early ground on an immigration overhaul in 2014, accusing the Obama administration of heartlessness in deporting children who had crossed the border from Mexico.

But Mr. O’Malley was also a staunch supporter of Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign — he called her ideas “new” then — and he rose to prominence as a tough-on-crime mayor in Baltimore, a city scarred by drugs and violence.

In two years of travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, he has frequently been reluctant to discuss Mrs. Clinton or to draw a pointed contrast with her, doing so only obliquely. Yet he took a sharp shot at her in his speech on Saturday, an apparent signal of things to come as he seizes on the anti-Wall Street sentiment among economic progressives and the notion of political dynasties.

“Recently the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs let his employees know that he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton,” Mr. O’Malley said, referring to Jeb Bush, a likely Republican candidate, and Mrs. Clinton. “I bet he would!”

“Well, I’ve got news for the bullies of Wall Street,” Mr. O’Malley added as the crowd cheered. “The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth, by you, between two royal families. It is a sacred trust to be earned from the American people and exercised on behalf of the people of these United States.”

The announcement did not go off without a hitch: Mr. O’Malley’s sound system conked out in the middle of a video made for the occasion, just before he took the stage.

His admirers believe he fills a natural void in the Democratic primary.

“Here you’ve got a clear generational divide, and a lot of Americans think about that,” said Gary Hart, a former Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate. “They are less inclined to divide themselves in the world between liberals and conservatives, and more between the past and the future.”

It was Mr. Hart’s come-from-behind candidacy in the 1984 Democratic primaries, which ultimately fell short, that helped inform Mr. O’Malley’s thinking about his own race. He often peppers his remarks with variants of Mr. Hart’s campaign mantra: “New ideas, new generation.”

Mr. O’Malley, who grew up in the Washington suburbs, took time off from Catholic University to work on Mr. Hart’s campaign that year. He later moved to Baltimore, married into a political family, became a city councilman and won the first of two terms as mayor in 1999 in a crowded field. He was credited with a crackdown on crime and on drugs.

He went on to win two terms as governor of Maryland. His star still rising, he was often described as a results-oriented policy expert, who signed into law bills allowing same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage.

But he also presided over a disastrous rollout of a health care exchange under the Affordable Care Act. And his legacy as mayor and then governor was called into question only last month when an unarmed black man, Freddie Gray, died of injuries sustained while he was in police custody here, sparking days of unrest.

Mr. O’Malley returned to the city to walk its streets even as critics of his tough-minded approach to policing — a few of whom protested his announcement — said his policies had created the climate for racial tensions that led to Mr. Gray’s death.

Mr. O’Malley acknowledged Saturday that the episode was “heartbreaking,” but said, “There is something to be offered to our country from those flames.”

“The scourge of hopelessness that happened to ignite here that evening transcends race. It transcends geography,” he said. He argued that poverty and drug addiction were killing young white people, not just blacks, in small towns and in cities, but that politicians had failed to respond.

“We have work to do,” Mr. O’Malley said. “Our economic and political system is upside down and backwards, and it is time to turn it around.”

Correction: May 30, 2015

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the action that Martin O’Malley, while governor, pushed in support of same-sex marriage. It was legislation, not a referendum.