Old Schaefer

Dan Rodricks reminds us of what William Donald Schaefer used to be:

It's hard, but the 20-somethings and 30-somethings and 40-somethings out there - particularly those who have moved to Maryland and Baltimore in recent years - just need to know, as Schaefer reaches the end of his political road, what the man gave this city and this state.

Esquire magazine once proclaimed him the greatest mayor in America. Go to Harborplace or a game at Camden Yards and look around - that's all him.

[snip]

See, I remember the Old Schaefer and a not-for-publication letter he wrote to me in the 1980s, during the recession that followed Ronald Reagan's election. Unemployment was high, and the president wondered openly why that was so when there were abundant help-wanted ads in the Sunday classifieds.

Schaefer understood what Reagan couldn't comprehend: that many of the ads were for jobs that required an education or advanced degree, and that the people who were collecting unemployment had worked in factories that had closed.

As mayor of Baltimore, which had suffered through the decline of industry and a significant loss of population and tax base, Schaefer knew that intimately. I wrote a column blasting Reagan for his cluelessness, and Schaefer wrote me a note with agreement and thanks. (The only one ever!) He was quite familiar with the recession's effect on working people, and he believed government leaders needed to help them rather than dismiss them to "market forces." That was Old Schaefer.

Schaefer certainly has been a unique figure, to put it mildly, in Maryland politics. But I think the kind of multigenerational reign that he epitomized (Curran and Sarbanes are obvious, but also the late Louis Goldstein) is coming to an end. Incumbency is no longer the safe bet it once was, as the fates of Ida Ruben, John Giannetti -- and Schaefer -- demonstrate.