The Obama-Clinton factor in Maryland elections

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The 2018 elections are but a sneeze away, and the Democratic Party hardly wants a Republican replay of 2016.

Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, hope the jackasses repeat their mistakes of 2014 and yawn their way through 2018.

In 2014, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown was the precursor to Hillary Clinton. A black family man and military combat veteran, how could he possibly lose? the Democrats thought.

But the Dems fumbled with the anointed one, and Republican Larry Hogan snatched the governorship, not by capturing traditional blue strongholds like Baltimore city and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, but by focusing on voters in Western Maryland, Anne Arundel County and the Eastern Shore, places where Democrats tread lightly.

To his party’s credit, Mr. Brown got back in line and now is comfortably seated in Congress, where he can help toe the anti-Trump, anti-Republican and anti-conservative party lines.

Still, there is a wedge issue that should be rearing its head any moment — and it’s name is Veterans Affairs.

See, on the basketball court, Barack Obama was better going to his left than his right, and so it was in politics. When he was in the Senate and the White House, he was keenly aware that the military and veterans affairs were Republican and conservative things.

Team Obama, however, didn’t understand as much.

In 2009, while Mrs. Clinton was serving as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, Mr. Brown was serving as co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team’s Veterans Affairs Agency Review. The legislation the review panel generated, the Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act, was intended to “ensur[e] that the VA can more effectively plan for the future and our veterans will have the sources of care and support they have earned,” then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

Then something terrible began to happen, as our veterans began returning home from various battlefields our VA health itself became embattled, unable, ahem, to deliver “the sources of care and support they have earned.”

Mr. Hogan, meanwhile, is nonoffensive. You can no more peg him a right-winger than a lefty. He has even made sure you’re unable to slap a Trump sticker on his lapel or put a megaphone in his lap labeled “Make America Great Again.”

What’s also important is that Mr. Hogan has hitched his Republican wagon onto such issues as veterans affairs, opioid abuse, tax relief, protecting victims of sex trafficking and school choice (in a state that has 14,000 families on charter school waiting lists). Mr. Hogan also has a 65 percent job approval rating.

No doubt, though, a Hogan re-election campaign will have its detractors. There are at least eight Democrats itching to take him on next year, including the tech guy, Alec Ross; Congressman John K. Delaney; Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker III; Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz; state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr.; attorney James Shea; former NAACP chief Ben Jealous; and Maryland’s king of the dandelions, Doug Gansler, the former Maryland attorney general who lost the gubernatorial primary race in 2014 to Mr. Brown.

That not one woman has signed up to run is quite telling, don’t you think?

As you might expect, all of those wannabes are part of the big tent that allows anybody in as long as they are not tagged GOP.

Where the Dems will draw the battle for 2018 is unclear. Name recognition, geography and good old-fashioned fundraising have yet to grab headlines (and you know they eventually will).

That’s why it’s imperative that now, or as soon as possible, America’s military capabilities and veterans affairs be placed on the front burner. If you wait for the Democratic Party to stir that pot, it’ll be politics as usual. That is to say, blame Donald Trump.

If you wait for the Dems, they’ll merely propose funding increases.

The next governor of Maryland must look to the state’s own backyard to exploit the point. Annapolis and the Naval Academy. Bethesda Medical Center (formerly Walter Reed hospital) and Joint Base Andrews. Naval Air Station Patuxent River and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, one of our nation’s top schools for veterans.

In politics, you snooze, you lose.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.