Good News for Maryland

Last week Kweisi Mfume announced that he was running for the Senate in 2006. Now there are strong indications that Michael Steele, the current Lieutenant Governor, will run against him.

Read about it here.

If so, the election will feature two extraordinary individuals.

Over the course of his career Mfume has matured and emerged as an important voice of moderation and reason within the Democratic policy. Steele is, quite simply, the most impressive black politician in Maryland and indeed in the Republican Party anywhere -- a budding superstar. What a feast for the voters!

"It would be Hank Aaron against Barry Bonds -- without steroids," Mr. Mfume
said, jokingly. "I don't want to say which one I am."

I agree!

UPDATE:

David Lublin and Thomas F. Schaller, writing in the Baltimore Sun, argue that in the above matchup, Steele would be favored over Mfume, despite the fact that no Republican Senate candidate has gotten more than 41% of the vote since 1980. Their reasoning is that Mfume would easily carry Baltimore and Prince Georges County. He would win the votes of white liberals and virtually all the black inhabitants of the state. Steele would carry white conservative voters. The real battle would be for the votes of white moderates who would be turned off by Mfume's liberalism and his association with the NAACP. They project that Steele would win that fight. In other words, if the fight is ideological -- between the liberal Mfume and the conservative Steele, Steele wins.

Steele's biggest weakness, they argue, would be his relative inexperience. If the Democrats would run an experienced white moderate against him, they could win. They would lose some, but by no means all black votes, and they would gain far more among white moderates who would be disquieted by Steele's conservatism, his race, and his relative inexperience.

Read it here.