C. Fraser Smith

By C. Fraser Smith

 — Mayor Sheila Dixon’s self-driven fate may have been sealed years before a jury fund her guilty of pilfering gifts for the needy.

From the start of her career in public service, she exhibited a willingness to step over the line of acceptable behavior.

It’s been called a sense of entitlement. From the start, it was not smart politically, either. Right or wrong, what she has done repeatedly was not going to play well. Why didn’t she know?

When she was elected to the Baltimore City Council she had a job in state government. She thought she should be able to keep it when she won her council seat. Others thought it unseemly to have two government paychecks at the same time. Double dipping, it was called.

She relented, finally.

But then she put her sister on her campaign payroll. Might not have strictly illegal, but it didn’t seem right. She wasn’t Richard Daley of Chicago or Tammany’s George Washington Plunkitt, but she was making a name for herself.

A computer contract went to a campaign manager under the radar. Payments were made in small amounts not noticed at first.

As City Council president, she had a romantic relationship with a developer who was doing business with the city. Affairs of the heart may overpower good judgment, to be sure, but when one party’s job requires her to vote on million-dollar tax breaks and the other is seeking those breaks big trouble looms.

Read more: Trading City Hall for a pittance

By C. Fraser Smith
 — The state of Maryland is a bastion of liberalism in America, but its Republican wings – Eastern Shore and Western Maryland – are crucibles of the political Right.

Republicans almost always win there. The trend was interrupted in 2008.

Many assumed State Senator Andy Harris would ride the First District’s GOP wave to victory. Didn’t happen. 

The very conservative and hard-ball Harris helped to unseat the nine-term Republican incumbent, Wayne Gilchrest, an Eastern Shore man who had served well but apparently a bit too moderately for some of the party faithful.

Gilchrest then supported the Democrat, Frank Kratovil, who won narrowly in the General Election.

Like the famous fictional Mr. Smith, Kratovil went to Washington. He could never forget the folks back home, of course, and he apparently assumes that at least half of them expect to be as Republican or conservative (if those terms, taken together, are no longer redundant) as possible.

Read more: Kratovil’s high wire act

C. Fraser Smith — The blessing known in Maryland as BRAC remains a mixed blessing.

The national military Base Realignment and Closure Act was added to the state’s vocabulary as if we had dodged a bullet. Base closure has often meant the loss of jobs, a scramble for local economies to re-invent themselves and for political figures to cry out in despair.

Ah, but not so in Maryland. Here, BRAC would allow Maryland to continue with business as usual. We’d have tens of thousands of new jobs and new revenue sources. Housing markets would be sustained. Infrastructure would be propped up.

Some gave a little thought to the downside. The wave of new workers and families would represent challenges for planners and budgeters.

But few spoke of BRAC as a threat to the Land of Pleasant Living.

Read more: BRAC: The gift that keeps on taking

By C. Fraser Smith — More evidence arrives daily – if more was needed – that there’s no easy way out of the deep trouble wrought by the practitioners of exotic financing devices on Wall Street.

And, difficult as it may be to contemplate, this downturn is not the worst thing that could happen. Maryland and, no doubt, other states face a deferred maintenance time bomb.

The economic hit we’ve taken exacerbates the anti-tax mood. That in turn deepens the sour political mood. Almost no public official will concede that taxes have to be raised – not just to solve immediate problems but to restore costly water and sewer lines which come unglued all the time.

We’re on the cusp of an election year, so no one in Annapolis lets the t-word pass their lips.

Read more: When dodging the downturn looks like a day in the park