The big non-congressional political story of the last week here in the Emerald City was Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan’s announcement that he was dropping out of the Maryland gubernatorial race due to a recent diagnosis of clinical depression. Duncan also emphatically endorsed his former primary rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who will now get a clear shot at incumbent Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, and vice-versa. I used to live in MoCo, and have also been around Duncan at DLC events, and appreciate him as a first-rate administrator who has come to dominate political life in a jurisdiction whose citizens, heavily including top-level federal employees, have extremely high standards for local government services. I obviously wish him well in his recovery from depression, but at the same time am relieved that he has abandoned an uphill fight against O’Malley that definitely required a negative campaign for which Duncan was temperamentally unsuited, and that would have helped Ehrlich in the general election. As for O’Malley, he has his detractors in Baltimore and elsewhere, but the man really does possess a notable “it” factor that led a lot of people to start talking about him as a potential presidential candidate about two minutes after his first election as mayor. His personal charisma is authentic and strong, and not only because women tend to find him very attractive (I once asked a young female colleague what she thought about O’Malley, and she simply smiled and said: “Meeow!” Appropriately, O’Malley is very scrupulous about avoiding situations where he is alone with women to whom he is not married). In fact, O’Malley, along with Barack Obama, has long been a candidate for the much-longed-for Bobby Kennedy role in the Democratic Party: a politician whose appeal transcends party or faction and potentially could create a new majority. Like RFK and Obama, O’Malley is hard to shoehorn ideologically; he’s always been close to the DLC (hosting two of our annual meetings), but he also endorsed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Like Bill Clinton, the closest thing we’ve had to Bobby since his assassination, O’Malley is a policy innovator who is completely open to new ideas, wherever they come from. But now he must face Ehrlich, the guy who in 2002 snuffed the potential national political career of RFK’s actual daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Ehrlich will almost certainly run a nasty negative campaign against O’Malley, and the mayor’s ability to rise above the fray and seek new allies for the progressive cause will be tested as never before.