Who's to blame?
The votes were not yet tallied on election night when Gov. Parris N. Glendening pronounced his lieutenant governor's bid to succeed him "one of the worst-run campaigns in the country," a remark Democrats across Maryland agreed was in particularly bad taste.
But in the three weeks since Kathleen Kennedy Townsend lost the governor's race, few dispute that he was right. And the man they most often blame for the humiliating loss to Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., for losing control of state government and costing hundreds of Democratic state workers their jobs is the man who ran her campaign: Alan Fleischmann.
"Alan Fleischmann couldn't lead a troop of Boy Scouts out of a telephone booth with a Seeing Eye dog. Please print that. That's the reason she lost," said Jim Farmer, a lawyer and conservationist who raised money for Townsend in Southern Maryland.
After any big defeat, the political staff is almost always the target of carping and second-guessing. But Maryland Democrats inside and outside the campaign began grumbling privately about Fleischmann long before Nov. 5. They described him as a political novice who had never run a campaign and who used his close relationship with Townsend to isolate her from more experienced advisers.
At first, Fleischmann declined to be interviewed. But when he heard that people were calling him the man who lost Maryland to the Republicans, he telephoned from a Thanksgiving break in West Palm Beach, Fla., to offer a wide-ranging defense.
Fleischmann said he bears no responsibility for Townsend's loss. Instead, he blamed Glendening, saying the governor's abysmal approval ratings crushed Townsend politically.
"He did things over and over again that were absolutely devastating to the campaign," Fleischmann said, citing Glendening's divorce and remarriage to a top aide 25 years his junior, his effort to use political connections to become chancellor of the University System of Maryland and, especially, his refusal to cut spending in the face of the largest budget shortfall in state history.
"All those things killed us," Fleischmann said. "We did assemble a great team, and we had a great candidate. But there was a louder voice called change. People wanted change."
Indeed, polls show that Glendening's unpopularity was a drag on Townsend's campaign. However, dozens of Democratic operatives, donors, lawmakers and administration officials said in interviews that her campaign also suffered from serious problems.
For example, in the summer, the campaign ordered a limited number of bumper stickers and yard signs, then offered some for sale in an Internet gift shop (for $1 and $4 respectively). Ehrlich, meanwhile, mailed his bumper stickers, gratis, to thousands of supporters.
When Ehrlich signs cropped up like weeds in August, Comptroller William Donald Schaefer (D) asked Townsend about hers. "She said, 'We'll have them,' " Schaefer recalled. "My thought was: When? In December?"
The campaign also mishandled relations with important supporters. MedChi, the state's largest association of physicians, waited months for a response to their candidate survey, even though they had given Townsend $6,000, the legal limit, during the primary season.
The group's president finally called Townsend's headquarters but still couldn't get a straight answer on tort reform, their top priority. Then MedChi leaders saw a newspaper account of a Townsend speech in which she pledged to support legislation to allow HMOs to designate some nurses as primary-care providers, another big issue.
Stunned and angry, MedChi's leaders took the unprecedented step of sending letters to 10,000 doctors a week before the election saying that Ehrlich stood with them on critical issues and that Townsend did not. MedChi's political action committee also cut a $6,000 check to Ehrlich.
"Of course, the campaign was furious," said MedChi Executive Director Michael Preston. "Her staffers called our president asking us what we could do. We said it's not what can we do. It's what can you do about your position."
Townsend's campaign also managed to discourage people who sought nothing more than to give her money.
"We wanted to find ways to donate to the campaign, to, you know, be helpful," said Kwame R. Brown, president of the Maryland/DC Minority Supplier Development Council, which offered to hold a fundraiser this spring. "It just never seemed to get off the ground. She was unable to squeeze it into her schedule."
There are dozens of such stories, of phone calls unreturned, letters unanswered. Even Farmer has one, and he's been a big donor to Townsend for years.
"I had 46 people, friends and business associates, ready, willing and able to go to work for Kathleen . . . and I could not get my calls returned," said Farmer, who described Townsend's campaign staff as "incompetent and arrogant."
"They had no idea what it took to elect somebody for governor," he said. "They forgot it's the people of Maryland that vote, not these people around the country that are interested in Camelot."
Fleischmann, 37, and a native of Baltimore, was working in international banking when he met Townsend at a Democratic dinner in 1990. Four years later, when Townsend was elected lieutenant governor, she asked Fleischmann to leave a job on Capitol Hill to become her chief of staff.
Since then, Fleischmann has been Townsend's closest adviser. He is godfather to her youngest daughter, Kerry, 10. He has helped her shop for clothes and polish her speaking style. Until he caught on with Townsend, Fleischmann's only campaign experience was as a volunteer for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. In 1998, when Townsend and Glendening won reelection against Republican Ellen Sauerbrey, Fleischmann again donated his time.
This spring, when Townsend was putting together her own campaign team, she turned to Fleischmann to lead it. She said she trusted his instincts because of his work in 1998. "He really turned that race around," Townsend said in August. "He helped us change our media consultants, made sure we were reaching out to elected officials and he helped get the field organization going."
Last week, Townsend agreed with Fleischmann's assertion that it was Glendening, not campaign mistakes, that cost her the election.
"It's hard to figure out, given how unpopular [Glendening] was, what else Alan could have done," Townsend said in a telephone interview from California, where she was celebrating Thanksgiving with family.
Fleischmann proved instrumental in clearing the Democratic field for Townsend. Over the past four years, he spent countless hours raising money, building support and persuading potential Democratic challengers such as Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan to stay out of the race.
By late June, all that stood between Townsend and the governor's mansion was Ehrlich, a Republican in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1. Townsend had millions in the bank and a 15-point lead in the polls.
"I think he was lulled into a belief that her election was inevitable," said Fleischmann's friend, Barbara A. Hoffman, the Democratic state senator from Baltimore who lost her bid for reelection. "If you don't learn anything else in politics, you need to learn that there isn't any such thing as the inevitable."
The wheels began to fall off the Townsend campaign the day she introduced her running mate, retired Adm. Charles R. Larson, a lifelong Republican who changed parties to join the ticket.
Within weeks, black Democrats complained that Townsend had not chosen an African American. Liberals and other Democratic activists grumbled that they had never heard of the guy.
"When she didn't pick a Democrat who was familiar to the base, all these cracks appeared: Labor. Glendening loyalists. Environmentalists. Blacks," said one liberal Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Alan's basic view was we don't need the party apparatus to win."
By mid-August, Ehrlich had come within a few points, and senior Democrats, including Glendening and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, demanded that Townsend bring on more experienced staff.
Townsend hired spokesman Peter Hamm and field director Karen White, two old hands from the 1998 campaign. But Fleischmann remained in control of day-to-day operations and doubled his salary -- from $4,026 every two weeks to $8,061, records show -- to make his pay "commensurate" with White's, he said.
Until the very end, Townsend and Fleischmann both believed she would win. On election night, they gathered with family and friends in a Baltimore hotel suite to watch the returns on television.
By 10 p.m., it was over.
Fleischmann said he called Ehrlich's campaign manager and handed the phone to Townsend, who conceded defeat. Then he followed her down to the ballroom, where he broke into tears.
"I was terribly disappointed, as you can imagine, sad for her and, frankly, sad for the state of Maryland," Fleischmann said.
The next day, Fleischmann sent an e-mail to his campaign staff. "I know a lot of you are probably feeling a bit uneasy about your future right now. But I want you to know that I will be here to help each one of you in the days and weeks ahead," he wrote.
Then Fleischmann hopped on a plane, flew to Florida and went to the beach.
The votes were not yet tallied on election night when Gov. Parris N. Glendening pronounced his lieutenant governor's bid to succeed him "one of the worst-run campaigns in the country," a remark Democrats across Maryland agreed was in particularly bad taste.
But in the three weeks since Kathleen Kennedy Townsend lost the governor's race, few dispute that he was right. And the man they most often blame for the humiliating loss to Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., for losing control of state government and costing hundreds of Democratic state workers their jobs is the man who ran her campaign: Alan Fleischmann.
"Alan Fleischmann couldn't lead a troop of Boy Scouts out of a telephone booth with a Seeing Eye dog. Please print that. That's the reason she lost," said Jim Farmer, a lawyer and conservationist who raised money for Townsend in Southern Maryland.
After any big defeat, the political staff is almost always the target of carping and second-guessing. But Maryland Democrats inside and outside the campaign began grumbling privately about Fleischmann long before Nov. 5. They described him as a political novice who had never run a campaign and who used his close relationship with Townsend to isolate her from more experienced advisers.
At first, Fleischmann declined to be interviewed. But when he heard that people were calling him the man who lost Maryland to the Republicans, he telephoned from a Thanksgiving break in West Palm Beach, Fla., to offer a wide-ranging defense.
Fleischmann said he bears no responsibility for Townsend's loss. Instead, he blamed Glendening, saying the governor's abysmal approval ratings crushed Townsend politically.
"He did things over and over again that were absolutely devastating to the campaign," Fleischmann said, citing Glendening's divorce and remarriage to a top aide 25 years his junior, his effort to use political connections to become chancellor of the University System of Maryland and, especially, his refusal to cut spending in the face of the largest budget shortfall in state history.
"All those things killed us," Fleischmann said. "We did assemble a great team, and we had a great candidate. But there was a louder voice called change. People wanted change."
Indeed, polls show that Glendening's unpopularity was a drag on Townsend's campaign. However, dozens of Democratic operatives, donors, lawmakers and administration officials said in interviews that her campaign also suffered from serious problems.
For example, in the summer, the campaign ordered a limited number of bumper stickers and yard signs, then offered some for sale in an Internet gift shop (for $1 and $4 respectively). Ehrlich, meanwhile, mailed his bumper stickers, gratis, to thousands of supporters.
When Ehrlich signs cropped up like weeds in August, Comptroller William Donald Schaefer (D) asked Townsend about hers. "She said, 'We'll have them,' " Schaefer recalled. "My thought was: When? In December?"
The campaign also mishandled relations with important supporters. MedChi, the state's largest association of physicians, waited months for a response to their candidate survey, even though they had given Townsend $6,000, the legal limit, during the primary season.
The group's president finally called Townsend's headquarters but still couldn't get a straight answer on tort reform, their top priority. Then MedChi leaders saw a newspaper account of a Townsend speech in which she pledged to support legislation to allow HMOs to designate some nurses as primary-care providers, another big issue.
Stunned and angry, MedChi's leaders took the unprecedented step of sending letters to 10,000 doctors a week before the election saying that Ehrlich stood with them on critical issues and that Townsend did not. MedChi's political action committee also cut a $6,000 check to Ehrlich.
"Of course, the campaign was furious," said MedChi Executive Director Michael Preston. "Her staffers called our president asking us what we could do. We said it's not what can we do. It's what can you do about your position."
Townsend's campaign also managed to discourage people who sought nothing more than to give her money.
"We wanted to find ways to donate to the campaign, to, you know, be helpful," said Kwame R. Brown, president of the Maryland/DC Minority Supplier Development Council, which offered to hold a fundraiser this spring. "It just never seemed to get off the ground. She was unable to squeeze it into her schedule."
There are dozens of such stories, of phone calls unreturned, letters unanswered. Even Farmer has one, and he's been a big donor to Townsend for years.
"I had 46 people, friends and business associates, ready, willing and able to go to work for Kathleen . . . and I could not get my calls returned," said Farmer, who described Townsend's campaign staff as "incompetent and arrogant."
"They had no idea what it took to elect somebody for governor," he said. "They forgot it's the people of Maryland that vote, not these people around the country that are interested in Camelot."
Fleischmann, 37, and a native of Baltimore, was working in international banking when he met Townsend at a Democratic dinner in 1990. Four years later, when Townsend was elected lieutenant governor, she asked Fleischmann to leave a job on Capitol Hill to become her chief of staff.
Since then, Fleischmann has been Townsend's closest adviser. He is godfather to her youngest daughter, Kerry, 10. He has helped her shop for clothes and polish her speaking style. Until he caught on with Townsend, Fleischmann's only campaign experience was as a volunteer for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. In 1998, when Townsend and Glendening won reelection against Republican Ellen Sauerbrey, Fleischmann again donated his time.
This spring, when Townsend was putting together her own campaign team, she turned to Fleischmann to lead it. She said she trusted his instincts because of his work in 1998. "He really turned that race around," Townsend said in August. "He helped us change our media consultants, made sure we were reaching out to elected officials and he helped get the field organization going."
Last week, Townsend agreed with Fleischmann's assertion that it was Glendening, not campaign mistakes, that cost her the election.
"It's hard to figure out, given how unpopular [Glendening] was, what else Alan could have done," Townsend said in a telephone interview from California, where she was celebrating Thanksgiving with family.
Fleischmann proved instrumental in clearing the Democratic field for Townsend. Over the past four years, he spent countless hours raising money, building support and persuading potential Democratic challengers such as Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan to stay out of the race.
By late June, all that stood between Townsend and the governor's mansion was Ehrlich, a Republican in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1. Townsend had millions in the bank and a 15-point lead in the polls.
"I think he was lulled into a belief that her election was inevitable," said Fleischmann's friend, Barbara A. Hoffman, the Democratic state senator from Baltimore who lost her bid for reelection. "If you don't learn anything else in politics, you need to learn that there isn't any such thing as the inevitable."
The wheels began to fall off the Townsend campaign the day she introduced her running mate, retired Adm. Charles R. Larson, a lifelong Republican who changed parties to join the ticket.
Within weeks, black Democrats complained that Townsend had not chosen an African American. Liberals and other Democratic activists grumbled that they had never heard of the guy.
"When she didn't pick a Democrat who was familiar to the base, all these cracks appeared: Labor. Glendening loyalists. Environmentalists. Blacks," said one liberal Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Alan's basic view was we don't need the party apparatus to win."
By mid-August, Ehrlich had come within a few points, and senior Democrats, including Glendening and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, demanded that Townsend bring on more experienced staff.
Townsend hired spokesman Peter Hamm and field director Karen White, two old hands from the 1998 campaign. But Fleischmann remained in control of day-to-day operations and doubled his salary -- from $4,026 every two weeks to $8,061, records show -- to make his pay "commensurate" with White's, he said.
Until the very end, Townsend and Fleischmann both believed she would win. On election night, they gathered with family and friends in a Baltimore hotel suite to watch the returns on television.
By 10 p.m., it was over.
Fleischmann said he called Ehrlich's campaign manager and handed the phone to Townsend, who conceded defeat. Then he followed her down to the ballroom, where he broke into tears.
"I was terribly disappointed, as you can imagine, sad for her and, frankly, sad for the state of Maryland," Fleischmann said.
The next day, Fleischmann sent an e-mail to his campaign staff. "I know a lot of you are probably feeling a bit uneasy about your future right now. But I want you to know that I will be here to help each one of you in the days and weeks ahead," he wrote.
Then Fleischmann hopped on a plane, flew to Florida and went to the beach.
