Olesker: Challenges Face Rawlings-Blake in First Full Term

When Stephanie Rawlings-Blake awakened Wednesday morning, with her tenure as mayor of Baltimore all but assured for another four years, she might have pondered that eternal question: What if they gave an election and nobody noticed?

Rawlings-Blake 52 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral polling—but her total number of votes represented less than one-fourth of Baltimore’s registered voters, and less than 13 percent of the city’s 620,000 residents.

There’s never been a race for mayor of Baltimore with a lower percentage —not even when William Donald Schaefer ran virtually unopposed.

All summer long, these candidates have been running around the city, knocking on doors, handing out literature, spreading around whatever money they could raise—and only about 78,000 people were sufficiently moved to get up from the couch and cast a ballot in somebody’s direction.

All of which means Rawlings-Blake has strong support among those paying attention to city politics—but she’s running a municipality where an awful lot of people didn’t care who won, or weren’t paying much attention, or haven’t got much emotional investment in the place where they live.

Or they thought the election was a done deal—based on polls showing the mayor with a commanding lead—and decided to stay home.

“I love my home town,” Rawlings-Blake told a few hundred supporters gathered Tuesday night at the Baltimore Soundstage, on downtown’s Market Place.

They loved her back—enough for a resounding defeat of all competition, including State Sen. Catherine Pugh, former city planning director Otis Rolley, former City Council Joseph "Jody" Landers and Circuit Court Clerk Frank Conaway.

A general election awaits Rawlings-Blake in November, but in a city with overwhelmingly Democratic registration, that vote might well look even punier than Tuesday’s.

Still, the mayor’s supporters found reason for cheer.

“What she showed everybody is stable leadership over these last 19 or 20 months,” Sen. Benjamin Cardin said. That’s the time since former Mayor Sheila Dixon was forced from office and Rawlings-Blake, then city council president, took over the top job. “She’s got big problems she’s got to face—education, jobs, crime—but she’s shown stability and leadership. That’s important.”

“It takes a while for voters to get to know people,” Del. Sandy Rosenberg added, “but people have learned they can trust her. And now that she’s gotten this big mandate, and the job feels like it’s really hers, she’ll have more political leverage. That means she can go to Annapolis and ask for big things. She’s now won the job. She’s somebody with measurable strength.”

“She’s done an outstanding job,” said Javier Bustamante, who runs Coloquio, the online Spanish magazine here. “You know, nature hasn’t been very nice. Hurricanes and earthquakes and the rest. But she’s shown a maturity and common sense that’s flabbergasted me.

“What I’d like to see now is more attention to the Hispanic community. She needs to pay attention to us.” Census figures say the city has about 11,000 Latinos, but Bustamante estimates the real figure is about twice that size.

“We’re a hardworking people, and we want to be a part of this city. That means jobs—teachers, police, firemen. It means putting some of us on commissions, on boards, government positions. We don’t want to be overlooked.”

Rawlings-Blake knows this.

“We move forward,” she said Tuesday night, “when we’re united as one city.”

That’s a kind of code. It means the days of racial divisiveness have to be relegated to the past. They held Baltimore back for too long. The mayor said these words, and then she quickly moved on—to all those real problems facing her over the next four years.