Populist Reform of the Democratic Party

...In one pitch, he's the man for left-wing Democrats tired of waiting for Elizabeth Warren to get into the race. In the other, he stresses his executive experience and says he has a history of "bringing people together to get things done." The two approaches aren't innately contradictory—O'Malley is indeed a liberal, though not really of the Elizabeth Warren type, and he does have experience as a governor and mayor—but in practice it means a series of tonal shifts, from outsider populist to consensus-seeking technocrat and back again. It doesn't help that O'Malley's politics aren't actually all that different from Clinton's, nor that even when he's clearly criticizing her he's reluctant to mention her by name. At one point, after one of Stephanopoulos' periodic references to his rival, he insisted that his comments were "not about being for or against any other candidate." It's hard to imagine Jim Webb or Bernie Sanders saying that. This just isn't the way an insurgent candidate talks....

http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/30/martin-omalley-the-challenger-who-dares