Turnout was heavy last Tuesday in Baltimore's mayoral primary election. And when the counting was done, 36-year-old city councilman Martin O'Malley emerged as the big winner. Baltimore being Baltimore, Mr. O'Malley will almost certainly win November's general election, too. He is, you see, a Democrat.
But he is also something else, as the next day's New York Times and Washington Post were quick to point out. "Baltimore Democrats Pick White Councilman in Mayoral Primary," the Times announced. The Post was even more succinct and obvious, right there on the front page: "White Man Gets Mayoral Nomination in Baltimore."
All of which is rather odd. It was not as if some woman had given birth to a zebra or France had won a war. Baltimore has had white mayors before. In fact, until outgoing Mayor Kurt Schmoke was elected a few years ago, Baltimore had never had any other kind. So a "startle" factor can't explain these headlines.
Nor can the actual campaign O'Malley and his competitors had run. True, distant third-place finisher Lawrence A. Bell 3rd had urged black voters to support him because "I look like you." But Bell's naked racial appeal, by universal agreement, had badly backfired. Ditto for second-place finisher Carl Stokes's complaints about the likely effects of O'Malley's crime proposals on minority residents. Those residents themselves were not impressed. Baltimore is a majority black jurisdiction. O'Malley beat Stokes by nearly two-to-one, with considerable support from black voters and a good number of prominent black elected officials throughout the state of Maryland.
O'Malley, in other words, made no appeal based on skin color; race did not in fact play much of a role in this campaign. The implicit assumption of the Post and Times headlines was that it should have: that voters in a majority-black city should be expected to choose a black mayor, and that it is automatically "news" when they do not. Ugly. Shame on both papers.
No, make that simply shame on the Times. Within 24 hours, the Washington Post repudiated its "White Man" headline. That headline, read a clarification in the next day's editions, "distorted the role of race in the election and violated Washington Post policy about reporting racial identifications only in proper context." The New York Times, by stark and smelly contrast, has so far chosen not to apologize for or even acknowledge its own bad judgment.