O'Malley pushes progressive line with voters during visit to Keene.
He’s not Hillary Clinton, he’s not Bernie Sanders, and he doesn’t garner the headlines those candidates do.
But Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and speaking Sunday in the Keene backyard of Kathy O’Donnell, he sought to make a case for his candidacy.
Addressing about 50 people, O’Malley offered up a dose of progressivism — gun control, student debt relief and banking reform — that drew cheers and applause. . .
O’Malley tried to distinguish himself by talking Sunday mostly about his work as the two-term governor of Maryland and as mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, where he said crime rates were reduced while he was in office.
He answered a question about his stance on gun control, a topic he has used to separate himself from the pack in recent months.
He sent a strongly worded email to supporters in June that called for a national ban on assault weapons after the shooting at a South Carolina church last month that left nine people dead. O’Malley is the only presidential candidate to advocate for an assault weapons ban.
“We need to square up to it, and we need to face it,” he said Sunday. “Combat weapons ... have no place on our streets.”
Kathy McGhee of Hollis said she came to Keene and was interested in O’Malley because of his focus on climate change.
“He is someone who is putting a stake in the ground, saying ‘we’re not doing enough,’ ” she said. “Everyone else does the rhetoric.”
Bill Thompson, a Chesterfield resident, said he will be watching to see what O’Malley does to break away from the more established Clinton and Sanders campaigns. Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb, former U.S. senators from Rhode Island and Virginia, respectively, are also running on the Democratic side; in the Republican primary, 16 candidates are vying for the nomination.
“He’s younger, fresher,” Thompson said of O’Malley. “He has to differentiate himself, which he’s tried to do.”
Nobody handed O’Malley, a member of an Irish rock band, a guitar on Sunday, as supporters of his have done over the past several weeks on the campaign trail. Two days before, O’Malley actually sang for an audience at a pub in Beaverdale, Iowa.
On Sunday, he was less lyrical but seemed to please the crowd with talk of a better future, deftly steering the conversation to foreign policy in response to a question from a man who seemed to imply that the Sept. 11 attacks were a U.S.-manufactured event.
After taking other questions, about the Affordable Care Act, bipartisanship and how he would address the country’s racial tensions, O’Malley called himself the only candidate in the Democratic primary race who has embodied progressive ideals.
“Only one of those has those goals and values, and has actually put them into action,” he said.
O’Malley’s busy Sunday schedule included an earlier appearance in Concord, where he addressed graduates of the St. Paul’s Advanced Studies program, and evening stops at a Claremont restaurant and a Lebanon home.
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