Mayor Of Baltimore

"I'll change the name [of the city] to `Funkytown' and declare war on Nebraska. I'll crack down on fat guys in tank tops. I'll cut taxes, and your lawn, too."With those solemn words, Reagan Warfield declared his availability as a candidate for mayor of Baltimore -- if anyone out there wants him.Warfield was one of several people to respond to The Sun's tongue-in-cheek search for someone willing to be drafted as a mayoral candidate by the Annapolis gang that has failed to convince Kweisi Mfume and Bishop L. Robinson to run. We asked them to tell us their qualifications, and we'd let would-be kingmakers William Donald Schaefer and Rep. Howard P. Rawlings know of their availability.

Gov. Martin O'Malley told The Sun on Wednesday that he would be open to political accountability for the state of city schools, according to our Statehouse Reporter Erin Cox.  In an interview with Sun editors, the governor said that he would back a measure similar to one lawmakers voted in for Prince George's County giving the county's executive an unprecedented level of authority over the long-troubled (though the district outperformed Baltimore...

Gov. William Donald Schaefer won't discuss the possibility but also is not discouraging the notion that he might "do a McKeldin" -- run for mayor of Baltimore in 1995 after his second and last term as governor ends. He will be 73 then. Only one person has been mayor, then governor, then mayor again -- the late Theodore R. McKeldin. This scenario apparently presumes that Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke will have moved on to another office by then. "Why not?" a longtime Schaefer supporter said of the possible return of the former mayor.

On the first day of kindergarten at Grace and St. Peter's School, a quiet girl was sitting alone, a new student in a room of boisterous children. Stephanie Rawlings marched up, introduced herself and took charge: "You're going to play with us and be our friend." That she was bossy and self-assured from an early age - her mother thinks her first complete sentence was "I did it myself" - might come as no surprise to those who have seen only the public side of Baltimore's next mayor.

SEN. JOHN KERRY may have gotten an inadvertent assist last week from Mayor Martin O'Malley. And we're not talking about the $1.2 million raised during a fund-raiser at the Ravens' stadium. No shrinking candidate himself, Senator Kerry moved boldly along the fault line of what's acceptable to say in criticism of a sitting president in a time of war. The mayor of Baltimore made him seem carefully measured. While introducing the senator, Mr. O'Malley said President Bush and his administration worry him more than the terrorists of al-Qaida.

CBS is hoping that the mayor of Baltimore is ready for prime time. The network is not banking on Martin O'Malley, or at least, not exactly. For Mayor of Baltimore, a show he's pitching to CBS, executive producer David Mills envisions an ex-professional athlete who is a populist political neophyte with blue-collar roots. Network spokesman Chris Ender confirmed that CBS has signed a contract to produce a pilot for the proposed show. But that pilot will be taped later this month only if Mills and his collaborators at Spelling Entertainment are able to land a well-known actor for the title role, someone acceptable to CBS. So far, Alec Baldwin has already turned down the part, according to people involved in the project.

The way the story is going around, the former mayor of Baltimore, Clarence "Du" Burns, just sandbagged the current mayor of Baltimore, Kurt L. Schmoke.Allegedly, the confrontation last week went something like this:Schmoke: "Mr. Former Mayor, we who are young and inexperienced humbly seek your wisdom and guidance in dealing with the sharks of the state legislature. Please come back to work for your city."Burns: "Beat it, kid, you bother me."Schmoke: "You don't want to work for the mayor of Baltimore?"

WHEN HE GOT to the toughest part of the eulogy, Martin O'Malley's voice dropped to a whisper. The mayor of Baltimore wished to comfort the families of two slain policemen last week, and so he reached for the sound of intimacy. He wanted to tell the children of John Platt and Kevin McCarthy that their fathers were loved, that their fathers were good men who'd spent their lives doing God's work, that each day they had shielded the most vulnerable among us. That is a beautiful thought to sustain grieving souls on the most terrible day of their lives, but it does not quite capture the specifics of this tragedy.

In front of the open casket with the slain body of Herman Jones, there was an empty seat. It was the last one remaining in the crowded Little Ark Missionary Baptist Church Tuesday morning, and now they were leading the mayor of Baltimore to it, and they sat him down, and there was Jones, the murdered city cop, lying right there in front of his eyes.Take my handPrecious LordLead me home. . .The mayor of Baltimore heard the words of the gospel choir pulsing through the church now, and he looked away from the casket, down to his own lap, to the little booklet somebody had placed in his hand with Herman Jones' face on the cover.

Baltimore's next mayor doesn't take office for five days, but the impending departure of the city's leader for the past 12 years hit home yesterday when he saw a press release that read "Kurt Schmoke, former Mayor of Baltimore."It wasn't the kind of statement Schmoke was looking for, not on this of all days -- the day he turned 50 and one of the last days before he retires from decades of public service to go into private law practice.It was, Schmoke said, an example of "the syndrome of the king is dead."

M ayor Sheila Dixon, who announced last week that she will resign and leave office on Feb. 4, is not the first Baltimore mayor to take that path. Actually, nine others have decided to pull the plug on their mayoral careers and for a variety of reasons. Oddly enough, the first mayor of Baltimore to resign was - well, its first mayor - James Calhoun. A Revolutionary War patriot, he was elected mayor Feb. 21, 1797, and served three successive terms and part of a fourth, until 1804, when he resigned.

This week marks 35 years since the death of Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, twice mayor of Baltimore and two-term governor of Maryland. The passage of three-and-a-half decades - and more than 40 years since he last held elective office - have, unfortunately, obscured his considerable achievements. McKeldin, who served as mayor from 1943 to 1947, governor from 1951 to 1959, then again as mayor from 1963 to 1967, was a Republican in a state which then - as now - elected few from the GOP to statewide office.

Baltimoreans who voted for Sheila Dixon in 2007 and Barack Obama in 2008 must have a mixture of feelings about the new president's snubbing - twice in just over a month - of the mayor of Baltimore. I'm sure a lot of them even feel sorry for Dixon. Yeah, she's under indictment, but she's missing all the fun, all the photo ops, all the history, not to mention dinner and dessert at the White House. Obama treats Republicans better than he treats Dixon. Shunning on this level must really smart.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's decision to furlough most of the state's work force was surely not the happiest moment of his tenure. But in a slack economy, it was probably a necessity - and it might have an upside for him politically. Faced with a widening pothole in the state's operating budget - and a statewide aversion to increasing taxes - Mr. O'Malley's budget-balancing options are limited. Thus, he plans to ask 67,000 state employees to take some days off, unpaid. The numbers had "significant" and "major" and "painful" stamped all over them.

O'Malley delivers same old medicine Many people in Maryland are right to dislike Gov. Martin O'Malley ("Taxes fuel discontent," Jan. 13). He was elected under the guise of the now too-often-used catchphrase "change," yet with light-speed (in political time) he brought more of that same thing for which the Democrats are famous - higher taxes. I expect a governor to deal with thorny issues such as the state's failed deregulation of electricity. But instead, Mr. O'Malley simply chose to pile tax upon tax on the very people who put him where he is. And he seems to have carried his feuds from his time as mayor of Baltimore into the governorship, which take time away from the people's business.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's decision to furlough most of the state's work force was surely not the happiest moment of his tenure. But in a slack economy, it was probably a necessity - and it might have an upside for him politically. Faced with a widening pothole in the state's operating budget - and a statewide aversion to increasing taxes - Mr. O'Malley's budget-balancing options are limited. Thus, he plans to ask 67,000 state employees to take some days off, unpaid. The numbers had "significant" and "major" and "painful" stamped all over them.

THEODORE R. McKeldin was born 98 years ago tomorrow into a working-class family in South Baltimore. In his long life of public service, he became Maryland's most successful politician, serving two terms each as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.He would have found incredible the widespread use today of polling by candidates, who put a finger to the wind to see what position they should take.Parade leaderMcKeldin did not follow the parade, he led it by persuasion, conviction and shoe leather politicking.