Martin O’Malley returned to New Hampshire this week, but the former Maryland Governor did a little more than campaign for the White House during his visit.
At a meet-and-greet in Nashua, O’Malley played to the crowd, quite literally, sing and strumming the guitar to “This Land Is Your Land” for dozens of young Democrats.
The ex-mayor of Baltimore also riled up the crowd during his speech – calling for a stronger middle class economy based on higher wages and equal pay.
“We know that an economy is built from the middle out and from the middle up. That a more a person learns the more a person earns the better that all of us do. The more worker earns the better customers they make for business and the more our economy grows,” he said Friday evening.
If O’Malley chooses to seek the Democratic nomination he faces an uphill climb. Early polls show that less than one percent of voters would cast their lots with him, which is 55 points behind Hillary Clinton. But O’Malley says he isn’t too worried about the numbers.
“You change it by having conversations one at a time, you do it by willing to go to living room to living room, from town square to town square and do it by talking about the things that will make our country better, that is how you do it,” O'Malley said, adding that it was something he learned while volunteering for a campaign in New Hampshire when he was in college.
He also stressed the need for a leader who would work for and with the people: "Politics are not the exclusive domain of the ultra wealthy. It is not the exclusive domain of those who have been born in to it or raised up in it. That politics is something that we all need to be a part of, that we need to be included in, that we need to be connected to.”
But O'Malley, stood by President Obama's work in the White House, and when asked if he would face similar gridlock if he was elected, he said, "he would not accept the premise that we are to be perpetually gridlocked and that we cannot change the politics."
O’Malley also campaigned in Manchester and Bedford, where he attended “Politics and Eggs.”
