Maryland Democrats

Top officials of the Maryland Democratic Party have asked the General Assembly to move the 1992 primary up from the second Tuesday in March to the first. The hope is that presidential candidates will pay more attention to Maryland than they would if the state stays part of "Super Tuesday" (March 12), which apparently in 1992 as in 1988 will be the occasion for a dozen or more primaries in mostly Southern states.The Maryland Democrats' hope is a forlorn one. When the Democratic National Committee changed its 1992 schedule to allow states to hold primaries on that first March Tuesday, it was anticipated that California would move its primary from June to March 5. No one wanted to compete for candidates' time with California ("a 900-pound gorilla," one party official said)

If you're a liberal living in Maryland, there's been plenty of reason to smile lately. The Old Line State continues to beat a steady path toward leading a new vanguard of progressive policy and politics in the United States. Let's start with last November's elections. Actually, no: To understand why those elections mattered, let's back up two more years to the 2010 statewide elections. Nationally, the 2010 cycle was nothing short of a nightmare for liberals and Democrats. The Democrats lost the U.S. House and, if not for a few self-destructing Republican Senate candidates, would have lost both chambers of Congress.

The several gerrymandered congressional redistricting plans now being considered by the General Assembly are self-serving and cynical. The heavy-handed manipulation of Maryland's voters is an crass perversion of how districts should be drawn, and it points up the corruptive danger of long-term one-party rule. Supreme Court rulings and federal laws require that congressional districts must be contiguous, compact, and equally populated. Please explain how any of the proposed districts meets the definition for being compact.

Maryland Democrats must be oblivious to the fact that people will buy gas where it is the least expensive ("Democratic plan raises gas tax," March 5). People, including truckers, going North or South on Interstate 95 will purchase fuel in either Delaware or Virginia avoiding paying more if Maryland is more expensive. Those who live close to or work in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware or D.C. will purchase their fuel there. How much fuel revenue will be lost by increasing the price with taxes?

Howard Dean's campaign in Maryland is the best organized among all the Democratic presidential candidates, and he's won the backing of some of the state's leading politicians. Now, the question is whether the former Vermont governor will even have a chance to put those advantages to use by the time Maryland's primary rolls around March 2. After Sen. John Kerry's win yesterday in the New Hampshire primary - eight days after his triumph in the Iowa caucuses - Maryland Democrats said Kerry would be hard to stop as he rides a wave of momentum into the rest of the country.

In the state's first large-scale campaign event of the 2012 election cycle, Maryland Democrats hosted their party's national leader Wednesday for a rally intended to energize voters and drum up support for President Barack Obama's re-election. The visit by Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz also came as races in two of Maryland's recently redrawn congressional districts are heating up rapidly as the state's April 3 primary nears. A crowd of potential candidates is now circling each of those districts.

Maryland's congressional maps are a product of the politicians, for the politicians, by the politicians. They were born of the two competing desires of the state's Democratic Party bosses: to give incumbent Democrats the precincts they want to make their re-election efforts easier, and to put one of the state's two Republican-held congressional seats at risk. They achieved their goals - Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett is facing his first serious challenge in years, and none of the incumbent Democrats is breaking a sweat.

Maryland Democratic Party Chairman Terry Lierman said last night he is resigning to become chief of staff to House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer. He is leaving after 2 1/2 years and at a high point, having shepherded the Democrats to victory in last year's contentious U.S. Senate and gubernatorial contests. "We took back our state is what we did," said Lierman, 59. "And now I want to have a role in helping take back our nation." On Lierman's watch, Martin O'Malley defeated Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., and then-U.

WHY DO ALL these things have to happen around the same time? It's getting so a columnist would have to write seven days a week to keep up with all this stuff. Since that's not how we operate around here, I'll have to touch on several topics in the same column. So here goes. A bill to permit slot machines in Maryland once again failed to pass in the legislature, and I have a pretty good idea as to why. No, it's not because those Democrats opposed to slots do so on ethical grounds. They know better than that.

A prominent fund-raiser for Maryland Democrats pleaded guilty yesterday to election fraud in a scheme to launder at least $46,000 in illegal campaign contributions he received from an official at the embassy of India in 1994.Lalit H. Gadhia -- a 57-year-old immigration lawyer and former campaign treasurer to Gov. Parris N. Glendening -- confessed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to his role in the scheme to influence congressional lawmakers involved in foreign-policy decisions affecting India.