Public Life

In his first interview since a photo surfaced showing him smoking from a marijuana pipe, Michael Phelps said yesterday that the intense public scrutiny has him contemplating whether he will swim in the 2012 Olympics. Phelps, who said that he "clearly made a mistake" and that the past week has been both embarrassing and uncomfortable for him, spoke with The Baltimore Sun inside Meadowbrook Aquatic Center after finishing his daily workout. While he still has goals he wants to achieve in the sport, he said, he's going to discuss it with his family and his coach, Bob Bowman.

He's moved into some of the choicest real estate in the U.S. Capitol, all crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed mirrors a stone's throw from the rotunda. He's gotten more publicity in the past six months than during his previous four decades in public life - most of it positive. But Steny H. Hoyer says the biggest change in his life since Democrats won control of Congress and chose him over a spirited challenger to become House majority leader was the sudden rush of power. "I used to wake up in the morning and wonder what's going to happen that day," he said during an interview wedged between a dizzying round of meetings, press conferences, floor appearances and phone calls with dignitaries.

SINCE Larry Young's acquittal on bribery and tax evasion charges last month, speculation about the popular former state senator's future has become a kind of parlor game. Will he run for office again? Will he write a book? Will he continue as a talk show host on WOLB-AM?We asked politicians and other citizens to weigh in on what they think Mr. Young's next career move will be.* * *State Sen. Clarence Mitchell IV represents the 44th District, the seat formerly held by Mr. Young:I suggest he enjoy his court victory.

IN HIS effort to become mayor of Baltimore, Lawrence Bell now declares with straight face that politics has no place in a political campaign.He wishes us all to be virgin again. It dawns on the City Council president that if his cousin Kweisi Mfume enters the race for mayor, then the entire business is over. Thus, Bell attempts to undo what he characterizes as cynical and underhanded State House political maneuvering with what he characterizes as clean and wholesome City Hall political maneuvering.

ON THIS balmy autumn evening off Dulaney Valley Road, with an election looming and fresh money in the air, William Donald Schaefer does what he does best when he's in the mood: He charms the socks off people who are delighted to have him back in public life."

An excerpt from an Orange County (Calif.) Register editorial that was published on Wednesday:BILL and Hillary Clinton came to Washington with two related messages that would eventually come back to bite them. First, they were ostentatiously disdainful of the era of Ronald Reagan as a decade of indulgence. Second, they boasted that the Clinton era would be one of moral renewal in public life -- implicitly suggesting that the GOP regime they were displacing had been ethically challenged. In contrast, Mr. Clinton vowed, his would be the ''most ethical'' administration in history.

WASHINGTON -- The capital's peculiar mystery has been playing out for almost a year, but now, as temperatures drop and impatience rises, we pretty much know who did what to whom and where they did it. We are not, in case you haven't seen a newspaper in the past 10 months or didn't pay your cable bill, talking about Col. Mustard in the conservatory with the rope.But a big mystery remains: Who doesn't get it?The Washington establishment and the Republicans -- there's a combo you didn't think you'd see as subjects of the same sentence in this life -- are still in a dither about the president's affair with a one-time intern.

Somebody once said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," but nobody in public life can remember who.The Starr report is most Americans' first exposure to the sordid world of Internet pornography.If all the Republicans who had affairs keep admitting it, they won't get up a quorum.An old Communist KGB spy boss agreed to run Russia, saving its democracy yet again.Pub Date: 9/14/98

IT GOES WITHOUT saying that those in public life should avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, and that the public must be aware of any conflict. At the same time, the public needs to discern between conflicts that smack of poor judgment or the desire to feather one's own nest and those that are coincidences, with no debilitating effects. The Baltimore County school board's approval of two relatively minor contracts with Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. while company vice president and shareholder Calvin Disney was board president falls in the latter category.

SAN FRANCISCO -- More than 2,000 men in American prisons are awaiting execution for one crime or another. By contrast, a mere handful of women are on death row 49, at last count. What is one to make of this disparity? To put the question bluntly: Are women less evil than men, less criminal, less dangerous?A few weeks ago in Illinois, Guinevere Garcia was scheduled to be executed. As a teen-ager, Ms. Garcia had murdered her infant daughter. She was on death row for the murder of her second husband.

In his first interview since a photo surfaced showing him smoking from a marijuana pipe, Michael Phelps said yesterday that the intense public scrutiny has him contemplating whether he will swim in the 2012 Olympics. Phelps, who said that he "clearly made a mistake" and that the past week has been both embarrassing and uncomfortable for him, spoke with The Baltimore Sun inside Meadowbrook Aquatic Center after finishing his daily workout. While he still has goals he wants to achieve in the sport, he said, he's going to discuss it with his family and his coach, Bob Bowman.

He's moved into some of the choicest real estate in the U.S. Capitol, all crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed mirrors a stone's throw from the rotunda. He's gotten more publicity in the past six months than during his previous four decades in public life - most of it positive. But Steny H. Hoyer says the biggest change in his life since Democrats won control of Congress and chose him over a spirited challenger to become House majority leader was the sudden rush of power. "I used to wake up in the morning and wonder what's going to happen that day," he said during an interview wedged between a dizzying round of meetings, press conferences, floor appearances and phone calls with dignitaries.

It is not enough to have faith; you must also have the courage to risk action on that faith, to risk failure upon that faith: the faith that one person can make a difference and that each of us must try. - Mayor Martin O'Malley This may be the essence of Martin Joseph O'Malley's campaign for governor. The Democratic candidate has issue papers and television commercials and bus tours, of course. But his argument for wresting control of government from Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. is based on a far more ambitious view of what government should be. He boils it down to this: We're all in it together.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Buck O'Neil looks old, and that's new. Though he's 94 years old, and almost 95, he has all his life been young and vibrant and alive. There was this time we were in a hotel ballroom in Gary, Ind. It was before a luncheon of some kind. A barbershop quartet began singing, "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho." Before the first verse ended, Buck jumped into the middle of the group. He sang in his rich baritone. He danced in step. "That sounded like old times!" he shouted when the song ended, and sweat made his face shine in the chandelier lights.

HE'S AN Episcopal minister. An 18-year veteran of the Senate. An heir to wealth and privilege widely respected for his independence and integrity. A trouble-shooter for Democratic as well as Republican administrations; he most recently spent two years working to resolve the seemingly intractable conflict in Sudan. John C. Danforth, 67, will need to tap every bit of his accumulated experience, reputation and native talent to succeed at the new task President Bush has assigned him: U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Now that the flap over Howard Dean's bonehead comment about Confederate flags and pickup trucks temporarily has abated, it might be a good time for the media to reconsider their seasonal obsession with what I've come to think of as the "gotcha gaffe." Every time someone in public life - usually but not necessarily a politician - says something stupid or ill-considered, especially in the course of a campaign, the media jump on him as if they'd just caught Adolf Hitler goose-stepping out of Berchtesgaden, snarling, "Let's kill all the Jews."

The public's confidence in President Bush's ability to deal wisely with an international crisis has slid sharply over the past five months, and a clear majority is uneasy about his ability to make the right decisions on the nation's economy, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll has found. Overall, the poll found, Americans are for the first time more critical than not of the president's ability to handle both foreign and domestic problems, and a majority says he does not share their priorities.

The war in Iraq has served to remind Americans that the rest of the world looks at them - and their motives - in many ways. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, which has been polling people from around the world on a variety of issues, finds that fear of and hostility toward the United States have been growing in a number of countries. In an effort to explore some of the differences in worldview, the Brookings Institution, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press organized a conference in Washington last month on the subject "God and Foreign Policy: The Religious Divide Between the U.S. and Europe."

WASHINGTON - As Attorney General John Ashcroft stood before a camera live from Moscow last month to announce that U.S. officials had foiled a plot to explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States, he began what he thought was a rehearsal. "We have captured a known terrorist," he began casually as MSNBC inadvertently beamed his image live to America. Then he loudly cleared his throat. "Let's try that again," he said. An aide brushed off his shoulders. Another applied hair spray. MSNBC took the feed off the air but soon returned with the real announcement, which Ashcroft issued with his usual urgent, even ominous tone.

His golden days as Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor have passed, but state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer won't walk away from a career in public service. Schaefer, 80, plans to announce tonight that he is seeking re-election as the state's revenue collector and fiscal guardian. Reflecting his status as an elder statesman of Maryland Democratic politics, no challenger from either party has made plans to run against him. "You never finish in public life," he said yesterday. "There's always a challenge."