Silver Spring Democratic Club

I really want to thank all of you for coming out tonight – Only in Montgomery County, 17 months before an election, could you pack an audience like this.

Blair Ewing, good to see you again, my friend. Valerie Ervin, a great up and coming leader in your county, and it is a great county.

I spent some time in my old stomping grounds with Mayor Giammo, who is doing a great job in Rockville. Many of the issues that I was learning about in Rockville – recreating that city-center, creating that sense of place, a sense of community where people are coming together, mixed use space, retail on the ground floor, people living on the other floors – they are many of the same sorts of things that we are in the process of doing in Baltimore, as well, and all of these things require vision, and they require leadership, and they require people who are willing to roll up their sleeves to make progress happen.

And that is what I am going to share with all of you a little bit tonight. I have some thoughts for you and I’ll ask for your involvement as I tell you about the people I’ve been leading for the last several years, as probably the first native of Montgomery County elected Mayor of Baltimore. Baltimore doesn’t know that yet, just to warn you.

It was really an honor, Mark, to meet your Mom – a woman who told me the first campaign she got into with both feet was for FDR. I had occasion recently to be out in Frederick for a JJ dinner for the county. It was on the anniversary of FDR’s death, and they had printed on the program that great vision that FDR laid out for county in January of 1941, certainly a turbulent time in World History.

He said, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is the freedom of expression, the freedom of speech, everywhere in the world. The second is each and every person’s freedom to worship God, in his or her own way, everywhere in the world. The third is the freedom from want, everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, anywhere in the world.”

As I read that beautiful creed with your neighbors in Frederick, I thought to myself, Mrs. Woodard, “what would FDR say about the state of our country’s politics?” If he were here today, what message would he have for us?

I doubt very seriously that FDR would have a lot of patience with those who cite selective passages from the Bible solely for the purpose of separating us from one another and for vilifying fellow human beings. I think, instead, that FDR would be reminding us of the more universal and aspirational aspects of the Bible: Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.

What would FDR say in this world where we have Fox News and this new sort of security threat? What would he say about the freedom from fear, anywhere in the world, when fear is causing us not even to share our true feelings, and to be very cautious about what we say?

If there is one thing I know about Maryland, one thing that I have learned, and one thing about Maryland that I love very much, it is that we are not a people who have ever been paralyzed by fear. We are a fearless people, we are a people who understand that, in fact, tolerance is a great American value, and that our diversity as a nation is the most unique strength we have among the nations on the planet, and it is something we cherish.

For the last six years I’ve had the honor of being able to serve your neighbors in the city of Baltimore, and I just wanted to share with you the things we’ve been doing, as your fearless neighbors, with your help. It has been said that Baltimore is a lot closer to Washington than Washington is to Baltimore, so some of this may not have reached you.

Over a thirty year period of time, our major city, our largest city in the state, had been in decline. If you look at the state of the public schools, if you look at the state of drug addiction and crime, or if you look at the most important indicator of all, when people vote with their feet and leave, Baltimore had been in a thirty year population decline. The mountains of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania had emptied into Baltimore after World War II, to build the armaments and manufacturing.

All the changes in the economy that had happened since then led to a very difficult time in Baltimore’s history. In 1999 when I volunteered to run for office in Baltimore, our city had become the most addicted city in America, every year, 1994-1999, and we had become the most violent city in America, by 1999, our schools could not claim that a single one of our grades was scoring majority proficient in reading or math. Quite a contrast to the sorts of standards we have as Marylanders, quite a contrast to the quality of life we have here in Montgomery County.

When we jumped into that campaign, we did so under the mantra that there is more that unites us than divides us, and that we really are all in this together, and that in fact our destiny is something that is determined not by anything other than the choices we make and what we choose to do.

So after a long hot summer, we started doing things differently in city government. We started actually measuring our performance, we started setting high goals, and we started looking at what we do, what government can’t do at all, and where government has an important role to play.

We started looking at how we deliver what we are supposed to deliver, and fundamental among those things was public safety. We started deploying police officers not based on politics, but we started deploying police officers based on where the greatest numbers of our citizens were being shot, or robbed, or mugged, or worse. We started measuring performance, not annually, but every single week, and we started doing it across every other department in city government.

With your help, we were able to double the investment in drug treatment for our neighbors who are uninsured, so that they are able to heal themselves from that scourge and become the sorts of parents and leaders we need them to be.

Five years in advance of the state mandate, we started having full day kindergarten for all of our children in the schools of city of Baltimore. And we started again to remind one another that if you believe you can’t, or you believe you can, you are probably right, and we chose to believe that we can, and that we can do it together.

Over the last six years we have achieved the largest reduction of violent crime of the 25 largest cities in America. We have achieved the second biggest reduction of drug related emergency room admissions of any city in America. And in our school system, a few years ago, for the first time in thirty years, a majority of our first graders scored proficient in reading and math, citywide. The next year they were joined by the second graders, the next year by the third graders, and this year we celebrated the fact that for the first time in thirty years, our first, second, third and fourth graders all scored majority proficient, city-wide, in reading and math.

Now remarkable things start to happen when you make a place safer, cleaner, and a better place for Kids to grow up: people start coming back. We have 7 billion dollars of new investment in our city, and the rate of job growth in our city actually exceeded the rate in the surrounding regions.

Average sales price of our homes – I love saying this in Montgomery County – has gone from $69,000 to about $131,000, so you see it is still a bargain. Let Mr. John Wagner of the Washington post record fact that the citizens of Montgomery County cheered at the value of 131,000 for a home.

I wanted to share that background with you because I know that we are here to focus on the future, in 2006, and I know you are thinking what does this mean in Montgomery County, when we have to tolerate the fact that thousands of our children are going to school in trailers when they should be in decent classrooms.

What does it mean for us in Montgomery County when we always seem to be about 10 years behind the growth curve when it comes to investing transportation, so we don’t have parents robbed of their valuable time with their family, having to sit in traffic for an hour and a half everyday.

I cannot come to you tonight and tell you that I know the solution to every sort of problem that is facing us. But I can tell you this: we are, not withstanding these last three years, one of the strongest states in the nation. That we are a resourceful people, and we are a diverse people, and when we set our mind to something that when we come to together, and when we openly and honestly communicate with one another, with respect, then there is no challenge we cannot make progress against. Will we get to perfect? Probably not in my lifetime, but we can make progress.

There is this very discouraging minimalist wind that is blowing through our national politics, that would try and tell us that “this far can you go, and no further” and sadly it has also come to us in Maryland. I don’t buy that. I don’t believe that greed is a great American value. I believe that by working together, that by realizing that we need one another, we can make the investments today that will make a better tomorrow for our kids. As we look at this race, and as we look at the challenges before us, I want to encourage all of you to engage with you neighbors, not in the politics of division, not in the politics of fear, but in the politics of those things that can unite us as a people. Ask your neighbors to look conditions like the health of the bay, where National Geographic gave us an “F”, and ask yourselves Are we making progress towards cleaning up the Bay, or are we just treading dirty water?

I ask you to look at the progress we’ve made in transportation; are we making progress, or are we just treading water?

I ask you to look at college tuition, in our state, where we know the greatest commodity we have is the brainpower of our people and that is the most sought after commodity in this creative and global economy, are we making progress when we actually raise tuition by 40% or would we instead be making progress if we made college education, continuing education, more accessible.

If you look at the thorny issue of health care, a challenge that has defied our national government, I don’t think we are making progress when there are 100,000 fewer of our neighbors without health care. I don’t think we are sending a message to new Americans we want to welcome to our state when we push pregnant moms and kids off of health care.

I’m fond of sharing a story about our state. Maryland is called the Old Line State. The reason we are called the Old line state is because even in 1776 we were fearless. It was a great year for the Declaration of Independence, there is a wonderful musical written about that year

It was an awful year for the American army. Our forces, after defeats at White Plains and Harlem Heights, were this close to annihilation, just 60 days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, were it not for 400 Marylanders, your neighbors and mine, not professional soldiers but citizen soldiers, some of them free black citizens in the still and yet very imperfect country. And there is a plaque dedicated to that Maryland 400 to this day in Brooklyn, not far from the mass graves of 256 of them, and it reads simply this, “In honor of the Maryland 400, who on this battlefield in 1776, saved the American Army.”

Maryland has a legacy, Maryland has a responsibility, and Maryland has an opportunity, my friends, to hold the line, again. To hold the line again that allows our country to become great. But it is not enough, in our state, that we simply hold the line, or slow the back slide. We must be bold again. We must set high goals, and declare that we will leave the Bay to the next generation cleaner than we inherited it ourselves.

We must set goals that make Maryland a leader in the intertwined issues of growth and transportation, that make Maryland a leader, that allow us to improve the quality of life while protecting the environment.

Maryland must become a leader and take advantage of the great location that we have in that creative crescent that runs from Baltimore to Washington to Richmond, that has within it wealth of institutions of higher learning, brainpower, discovery, and quite possibly the people that will figure out a cure to HIV/AIDS, not to mention Malaria, Dysentery, those awful diseases that are out there, waiting for America and Maryland to figure out a way to unleash the weapons of mass salvation and extend the healing hands from places like Hopkins and University of Maryland.

This is our calling, should we choose it. One thing is for sure, if we don’t choose it, we will never get to it. We have to realize that, in fact, we do need one another, that we are all in this together, and that Maryland and this country are stronger together.

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