THIS WAS TWO months ago at Iggy's Restaurant, Eastern Avenue and High Street, early on the morning of Maryland's primary election. Gathered around a bunch of tables shoved together were maybe 20 people, all allegedly Democrats, including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and William Donald Schaefer. And then, in walked Patricia C. Jessamy.
"Here she is," Schaefer called out.
Jessamy, the embattled Baltimore state's attorney in the fight of her political life, sat down at one end of the gathering, between Townsend and Schaefer. A veil of merriment covered the tension that all politicians feel on Election Day.
"Oh, my God," Schaefer said. "It's heart-wrenching, it's nerve-wracking. You never get used to it."
All this, after four decades of running for office, and winning and winning, and on this day he would sail to another easy victory. But the dread was with him like a sickness, and it was tempered only by odd moments.
Such as Gene Raynor's arrival a few moments after Jessamy's. Raynor, the former Board of Elections chief, was now running Schaefer's re-election campaign for comptroller. The morning was sunny and warm. Raynor strolled in wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Schaefer let him have it right away.
"Here's Raynor, who didn't even have time to put pants on," Schaefer said.
"I don't have time to be sitting around eating breakfast, either," Raynor said.
Then, amid the stifled laughter of these 20 people who had elections to handle, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend turned to Patricia C. Jessamy.
"How do you deal with this?" she asked.
"I meditate," Jessamy said.
"Medicate?" Schaefer said.
"Meditate," Jessamy said again. Then she addressed the whole table, where old-line Democrats such as Raynor and Alan Fleischmann, and Laney Lebow-Sachs and Mark Wasserman, and Bob Douglass and Domenick Leone Jr., listened.
"We're all going to meditate together," Jessamy said. "Ready? Three times. Aaaahmmm."
The whole crowd at the table joined in, and the sound could be heard onto the street.
"Aaahhhmmm. Ahhhmmm."
"There you go," somebody called out when it was over. "We're all New Age Democrats now."
Indeed, it is a new age for Maryland's Democrats -- and Republicans, too.
