Quite a few Democrats and media analysts are talking about him as a future president. He’s been in office for 35 days.
Christian Hall and Mario Parker, writing at Bloomberg about then-incoming Maryland governor Wes Moore, January 17:
As Democrats wring their hands about who might run — and win — once Joe Biden leaves office, Maryland Governor-elect Wes Moore emerges as if he were created in a political lab: a person of color who rose from poverty and served in combat. A Rhodes scholar and best-selling author on Oprah Winfrey’s radar. And through his work on Wall Street and the Robin Hood Foundation, he boasts a network of celebrity and hedge fund contacts.
On January 20, former DNC chair Donna Brazile wrote, “If his policies prove popular and successful in Maryland, it’s easy to imagine him running for president years from now.”
Jonathan Martin, writing in Politico, January 26: “Yet as I made my way around Harrisburg and Annapolis last week, I was struck by the air of expectations, or really the operating assumption, that both new governors would run for president.”
On February 15, during a visit to an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall in Lanham, Md., President Biden gushed, “and you got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell you. He’s the real deal. And the boy looks like he can still play. He got some guns on him.” (As we all know, there’s nothing more welcome or appreciated in our society than an elderly white man calling a 44-year-old African American man “the boy.”)
Keep in mind, Wes Moore has been in office for 35 days. Last week, Moore felt the need to declare that no, he will not run for president in 2024.
Heck, back in November, before the general election that Moore was overwhelmingly favored to win, Walter Shapiro wrote in the New Republic, “Afterward, a leading DNC insider who was in attendance—not normally someone prone to gush—described Moore to me as ‘a future president.’”
This feels a bit like how certain corners of the Democratic Party and national media responded to Barack Obama after his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004 — except then Obama was a three-term Illinois state senator, and the Maryland governorship is Moore’s first experience in elected office.
Credit Moore for a genuinely inspiring tale of overcoming childhood adversity — he says he may not have pulled his life together without attending Valley Forge Military Academy — and yes, his resume shines: He “graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 and then received a master’s degree in international relations from Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar, in 2004. After graduating, he was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division and a captain in the United States Army and did a combat tour in Afghanistan.” Throw in the right oratorical gifts and the friendship with Oprah and voilà — instant presidential-candidate buzz.
But there’s just one little detail that hasn’t been addressed, and it’s revealing that it’s such a nonfactor or afterthought to those already talking up Moore as a future president. How well can he run a state government?
Winning a second term is unlikely to be the problem. As a Democratic incumbent in a state with about 2.2 million registered Democrats and less than 1 million registered Republicans, Moore has an excellent chance of being a two-term governor. With solid Democratic majorities in the state senate and state assembly, Moore’s agenda isn’t likely to be blocked by partisan gridlock.
But running a state government, swaying a state legislature, and dealing with the inevitable curveballs of natural disasters and unexpected crises is a little different from leadership in the military or business world. Sometimes those leadership skills transfer to a new environment easily; sometimes they don’t.
Moore’s budgetary priorities don’t look all that different from most other blue-state Democratic governors: raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, $3.5 million to train health-care providers in abortion care, $9 million for more clean-energy projects, $46.5 million to set up the state’s recently legalized adult-use cannabis marketplace. Conservatives may be pleasantly surprised that Moore did not propose tax increases, but state GOP lawmakers contend using funding from the state’s rainy-day fund is just setting the stage for tax increases in coming years.
Maryland is a state with certain persistent thorny problems, most notably the troubles of its largest city, Baltimore. Shapiro warned, “the national reputation of a Democratic governor in Maryland will largely rise and fall with what happens in Baltimore.” Fairly or not, the state’s image just isn’t shaped nearly as much by the Eastern Shore, D.C. suburbs, Annapolis or the panhandle.
A lot of smart, accomplished, driven, and well-meaning men and women have set out to fix Baltimore’s problems of crime, poverty, and failing schools, and very few have finished with a widespread or lasting impact. Maryland Democrats outside of Baltimore are exasperated with Baltimore’s Democrats, whom they deem ineffective or incompetent, and the seeming intractability of the city’s severe problems. Back in 2018, former GOP governor Robert Ehrlich told me, “There is great frustration with Baltimore and its dysfunction that transcends party. Baltimore is a city with profound problems.”
If, a few years from now, Baltimore has genuinely turned around as a result of Moore’s policies and leadership, then never mind nominating him for president, he should be nominated for sainthood.
An inspiring life story about overcoming adversity, military service, oratorical gifts — these are all good traits for a potential president to have. But those aren’t the actual job; the actual job is running the executive branch of the federal government. And I’d contend that all of those other good traits won’t mean much — or more accurately, shouldn’t mean much — if Moore can’t be an effective governor who can generate tangible improvements in the lives of Marylanders. But apparently some Democrats and media fans don’t want to wait to see how Moore performs in government before swooning about the prospect of his running for president.