Primer for Tonight’s Interview

As Brian noted below in the promo for tonight’s Red Maryland Radio, we will be joined by 2010 Gubernatorial candidate Brian Murphy. Some may be wondering what we would be speaking about with Mr. Murphy given, as Brian put it so well last week on the radio, Mr. Murphy “is not running for anything and is not relevant to the discussion.”

Despite Brian’s poignant comment, if you listened to last week’s show you know that there were criticisms of Mr. Murphy made by a caller to the show. We wanted to give Mr. Murphy a chance to respond. Of course, readers of this blog know that much of the toughest criticism of Mr. Murphy has come from this blog.

I think, in the interest of fairness, if we are giving Mr. Murphy a chance to respond to Red Maryland generated criticism we should let him address all of the criticism from this blog.

For those who may not remember what the contributors of this blog wrote during last year’s election, below is a summary with links to the full articles for your review:

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Brian Griffiths described Mr. Murphy as “the guy who Red Maryland exposed as a Johnny Come Lately to the GOP despite the fact that he and his supporters want to determine who is and who is not sufficiently Republican enough.”

In a post that excoriated Mr. Murphy I wrote

“And while the Murphy campaign attempts to portray their candidate as the conservative champion ready to slay the faux Republican Bob Ehrlich, we find that Murphy himself has only been a Republican since 2005 and, as Brian points out, did not even vote in the GOP primary when he had the chance.

…

Now Brian Murphy has responded to the whole decades of being a democrat thing by saying that he changed parties like Ronald Reagan. Personally, as a lifelong conservative Republican who was inspired by the Reagan Revolution, I actually find this more offensive than the facts about his “johnny come lately” Republicanism. This is a guy who was a Democrat when Reagan was President and was a Democrat when Glendenning was Governor. In fact, while I and many of you were working to get Bob Ehrlich elected in 2002 as the first Republican Governor in 40 years, Brian Murphy was still a Democrat.”

Martin Watcher was perhaps even less restrained in his criticism

“When Red Maryland’s editors endorsed Bob Ehrlich for Governor, they were extremely kind to Brian Murphy in their endorsement. I wouldn’t have been, and will not be today. It has nothing to do with Governor Palin, who along with Brian Griffiths I picked as being my choice for VP long before John McCain plucked her from the obscurity of Alaska. My opposition to Brian Murphy comes from his record.Sure you can criticize Bob Ehrlich’s record, he has one. He has been in a position of responsibility for years and with responsibility comes good and bad decisions. But has anybody actually looked at Brian Murphy’s record?”

Mark Newgent commented upon the significance of Gov. Palin’s endorsement

“One interesting and important fact not mentioned so far about Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Brian Murphy: Top Palin advisor John Coale and his strong ties to Martin O’Malley and the Maryland Democratic Party.Coale, is the husband of Fox New’s host Greta Van Susteren, a trial lawyer, who struck it rich on the 1997 settlement with Big Tobacco, and an extremely generous Democratic donor.Coale loaned O’Malley’s campaign $500,000 in the waning days of the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, a debt, which it has yet to repay.Between federal and state accounts Coale has given the Maryland Democratic Party over $60,000.So given Coale’s ties and contributions to the Maryland Democratic machine is it any surprise that out of the blue Sarah Palin endorses the primary opponent of Bob Ehrlich, the one man who can end the Democrats stranglehold over the state.Correction: O’Malley did repay the loan in 2007.”

Another pointed criticism of the Murphy campaign by Brian Griffiths that has particular relevance to the discussion of current candidates:

“Probably something to do with the fact that, over the six-month course of this campaign, Murphy’s name ID is hovering at 27%. Hard to imagine that if Murphy’s name ID hasn’t broken a third of the electorate in the last six months that the rate will continue to improve between now and the end of his campaign in September.Makes you wonder how long before those few Murphy supporters out there realize that tilting at windmills with the potential specter of a second term for O’Malley is really worth it…”

This is just a sample of what we have written which, in addition to criticism, includes complimentary coverage as well from our contributors. After the primary we all closed ranks behind Governor Ehrlich and opposed O’Malley. We even invited Mr. Murphy to post a commentary of his own on our site.

But the criticisms of Mr. Murphy’s run for statewide office are still relevant and accurate especially given our discussion of candidates running to challenge another statewide office holder Senator Ben Cardin. Mr. Murphy, for reasons I hope we can address, has put his support behind another political novice choosing his first run for office to be a statewide campaign against an extremely experienced, well-funded and well entrenched incumbent.

So we will have plenty to talk about. You should listen in at 8pm. If you have not heard our prior discussions, check them out by subscribing to our iTunes feed.