Early on in his presidential campaign, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is repeatedly hitting on a reported quote from a top Wall Street executive to suggest that neither former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton nor former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush would do enough to rein in big banks in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse.
In an interview Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Mr. O’Malley called the presidency a “sacred trust.”
“And I believe that we are best served by giving the choice of who our president should be to the people of the United States and not to the big banks on Wall Street,” he said.
“I believe that when the CEO of Goldman Sachs says he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton, that should be a wake-up call for all of us,” he said, a reference to reports quoting Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “Because we still haven’t delivered on the promise of reining in excesses on Wall Street, and our entire economy [is] still vulnerable to that.”
On Saturday, Mr. O’Malley officially joined Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the contest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
Mrs. Clinton, the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic nomination, was the first choice of 57 percent of likely Democratic Iowa caucus-goers in a new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll. Mr. Sanders was next at 16 percent, followed by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 8 percent and Mr. O’Malley and former Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia at 2 percent.
Mr. Bush is not yet an official candidate on the Republican side, but has been at or near the top of much of the early public polling on the prospective 2016 GOP field.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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