A rift among Maryland's Democrats - with Comptroller Peter Franchot increasingly on the outs - became decidedly more public and bitter yesterday with a tartly worded missive from one of the party's standard-bearers.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, a Prince George's County Democrat who has held his leadership post in the General Assembly for more than two decades, sent a letter to Franchot, the state's elected chief fiscal officer, excoriating him for his "obsession with the press" and "disregard for the relationships you need to be an effective leader."
Franchot has sparred in the past with Gov. Martin O'Malley, also a Democrat, and took aim at him and the General Assembly this week for passage of a budget-balancing package last fall that raised taxes, cut spending and forwarded a proposal to legalize slot machines to voters in a November referendum. Franchot called for a blue-ribbon panel to study spending practices, saying the state budget has doubled in the past decade.
"Rather than growing into your role," Miller wrote in the letter released yesterday, "you are clinging to the worst habits of a novice elected official - preening for the press, repackaging old ideas and calling them new, expanding your budget while criticizing others for bloat in theirs, offering policy alternatives one day that are incongruous with your positions from the day before, and criticizing others for leading while offering nothing to the debate."
Franchot responded with his own letter, dated yesterday, in which he said he was disappointed in the "tone and substance" of Miller's correspondence that "lobbed personal insults and questioned my character."
The comptroller went on to describe Miller's tenure as one characterized by "intemperate public remarks, acrimonious personal feuds, unconditional fealty to the interests of the national gambling industry, and stories of brass-knuckle political tactics that would cause the hardest-bitten of Tammany Hall ward-heelers to blush."
While many in the Democratic Party suspect that Franchot is laying the groundwork for an insurgent run against O'Malley in 2010 for the governor's mansion, the comptroller insists that he only wants to run for re-election to his current office.
And Franchot's frosty relations with State House leaders aren't unprecedented; rather, they are reminiscent of former Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's frequent clashes with former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, and occasional ones with former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican.
