A Deeper Look at Winners and Losers

The Sun has released their list of political winners and losers. As always, their opinions are subjective but seem to ignore certain political realities that are inconvenient to their narrative:

• Elijah Cummings is listed as a winner. Somehow, his Hamlet act on the U.S. Senate seat is somehow a positive while the Sun somehow ignored the fact that Cummings was implicated in the release of privileged information about non-profit groups under investigation by the IRS.
• Marilyn Mosby is listed as some sort of political rock star, not long after the first Freddie Gray trial ended in disaster for the prosecution, with their strongest case going down to defeat;
• Ben Carson is identified as a winner, despite the fact that he is out of his element as a Presidential candidate and showing once again that somebody brilliant in one field may not be so great in another;
• Kevin Kamenetz can honestly be only listed as a winner by somebody who would actively be promoting his candidacy for Governor in 2018. Even the Sun notes that he can’t work with his Democratically-controlled County Council, he only discovered the Red Line as a political issue until Governor Hogan cancelled it, and there are still 30,000 Baltimore County students who don’t have air conditioning simply because he’s so obtuse.
• Anthony Brown seems to be listed as a winner only because he filed papers to run for Congress. Nobody can honestly say that Brown is even a favorite for this seat.

It seems as if the only calls that the Sun got right were listing Governor Hogan as a winner and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Martin O’Malley as losers.

The list, of course, also ignores many potential political winners for 2015, including Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford for his work in helping Governor Hogan during his cancer diagnosis, Comptroller Peter Franchot for his creating an alternative voice in the Democratic Party on taxes, among others.

These lists are instructive insofar as trying to get some sort of inclination as to how the Baltimore Sun editorial board sees certain politicians. But, like most of their editorials, it is complete divorced from political reality and does not take into account the fact that Maryland’s political world changed last November.