“Why Can’t Liberals Make the Trains Run on Time?”

Martin O’Malley is having a rough time of it. Yeah, he may be making demands of BGE and PEPCO to turn the power on sooner rather than later. But Gregg Easterbrook (a Montgomery County resident) tore O’Malley a new one in The Atlantic today for being (what else) too busy running for President to deal with the issues of the power outage back home. This is my favorite part:

Given how bad Pepco is, O’Malley would seem to have a tremendous opportunity to make his mark as a reformer, bringing a tainted regulatory hierarchy to heel. This is especially true because Maryland law assigns all authority over power utilities to the state level — there’s nothing the Montgomery County Council can do. If O’Malley runs for the presidency, his performance in Annapolis would be expected to be his strongest credential.

That’s if he was in Annapolis. O’Malley openly ignores his own state to travel elsewhere. Not only did O’Malley flee his own state this weekend at the first sign of trouble. Recently he’s frequently appeared in the national media to talk about Romney, health care, the economy, Congress, and other topics. O’Malley doesn’t have time to deal with issues that impact his own state, but has plenty of time to campaign in New Hampshire. 

After the storm struck, O’Malley declared he would “keep his boot up Pepco’s backside” — not for reform, but to make sure the utility met its extremely sluggish self-set deadline of most customers restored after a week. Reforming state services would be actual work; the governor is much more interested in being interviewed about himself than in performing his duties.