Frontrunner Hillary Clinton and solid #2 Bernie Sanders held serve in Tuesday’s CNN Democratic Party presidential debate. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley emerged from the others receiving votes candidates as a legit player in the 2016 race.
Targeted early in the debate by moderator Anderson Cooper on the subject of the spring unrest in Baltimore, where he had served as mayor before being elected governor in Maryland in 2007, O’Malley defended his record on aggressive policing tactics as being necessary “so that people could actually walk and not have to worry about their kids or their loved ones of being victims of violent crime,” before scoring points on how he led an effort in the statehouse to fight the NRA to pass meaningful gun-safety legislation.
Later he scored points raising issue with Clinton on Glass-Steagall, a law preventing commercial banks from engaging in investment banking dating to the Depression era that was repealed in 1999 during the administration of Bill Clinton, opening the floodgates to the excesses of the mid-Aughts that precipitated the Great Recession.
O’Malley also scored points with basic fluidity in presenting his thoughts. Former Virginia U.S. Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee bumbled and stumbled their way through their limited speaking time during the debate.
– Story by Chris Graham
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