WASHINGTON - When Howard Dean told Kurt L. Schmoke that he planned to run for president, the former Baltimore mayor offered to help his friend and Yale classmate.
Schmoke knew he could help advise Dean on urban policy. He knew he could help the former Vermont governor reach out to African-Americans. But Schmoke, now dean of the Howard University Law School, also feared he could hurt Dean.
As someone who 15 years ago earned recognition - notoriety, mostly - for his bold suggestion that illegal drugs be decriminalized, Schmoke has had to walk a fine line in supporting any national candidate.
"There are places that I go, and you say my name and it's immediately vilified," he said in a recent interview at his law school office.
Indeed, Schmoke, a former state's attorney for Baltimore and a three-term mayor, acknowledges that his maverick stance on drugs ensured that his political career halted at the local level.
So Schmoke told Dean and his staff in Vermont that he would do anything he could to help elect the doctor-turned-politician. "But I said, `Look, you've got to make it very clear I'm here as a friend and former mayor, and not as a policy adviser on this issue.'
"I wouldn't want to hurt his campaign in any way by any suggestion that he was embracing my more radical point of view - which I still believe is correct, but I won't make that any kind of litmus test for supporting a candidate," he says.
Schmoke, 54, has known Dean since 1967, when they both entered Yale and became friends through two of Dean's roommates. These days, Schmoke - who this past semester also taught courses on strategic leadership at the U.S. Army War College and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. - is serving as one of many informal advisers and cheerleaders for the once little-known governor who has rocketed beyond most expectations to the front of the Democratic pack.
The former mayor traveled with Dean last summer on a campaign swing to Chicago and New York, and introduced him at a rally at the University of Maryland, College Park in September. Schmoke occasionally discusses public housing, transportation, education - nearly every aspect of urban life, with the deliberate exception of drug abuse - with Dean's policy team.
"We know what not to talk about," Schmoke says with his customary hearty laugh.
This fall, Schmoke helped defend Dean after an uproar over the candidate's remarks invoking the Confederate flag that offended some African-Americans and others.
