Martin O’Malley

He also has a side career: Since he was in his 20s, he’s been the frontman for O’Malley’s March, a Celtic rock band.

He and his wife have four children.

His stand (entering the race)

O’Malley launched his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination Saturday, May 30, in the heart of Baltimore, the city he once led. But Baltimore today confronts an image far different from the one O’Malley left behind when his term as mayor ended eight years ago.

The city has been rocked by killings and riots and has become a national symbol of urban turmoil and despair.

O’Malley, 52, confronted the controversy as he has since parts of West Baltimore erupted in protest in April over the death of Freddie Gray, an African-American man who died in police custody.

Critics charged that his anti-crime policies alienated that constituency. O’Malley vigorously disagreed, and spent much of his announcement speech addressing the concerns.

“For all of us who have given so much of our energies to making our city a safer, fairer, more just and more prosperous place, it was a heartbreaking night in the life of our city, ” he said. “But there is something to be learned from that night, and there is something to be offered to our country from those flames.”

Baltimore’s agony, O’Malley told an audience of about 600, was “not only about race; not only about policing in America. It’s about everything it is supposed to mean to be an American.”

He talked about income inequality, poverty and how too many people have too little hope. He said he would be their champion, beholden not to Wall Street but to working-class people.

“Tell me how it is you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in our country, but if you wreck the nation’s economy you are untouchable, ” he said.

O’Malley remains a longshot, barely visible in Democratic presidential polls behind front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he does not appear to have the passionate liberal following of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

O’Malley devoted much of his speech to his record as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, but took one swipe at Clinton.

“The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth between two royal families, ” he said, also a reference to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is expected to seek the Republican nomination.

His support

He has positioned himself as a populist for the Democratic Party against the status quo campaign of Clinton. However, Sanders also has taken up that mantle. Both Sanders and O’Malley back a $15-an-hour minimum wage and support expanding paid family leave and overtime rules.

He has highlighted his executive experience as a mayor and governor. He notes his efforts to raise the minimum wage and improve education in Maryland.

In his home state, O’Malley pushed for and got passed gun control, tuition help for immigrants who did not have residency status and the legalization of same-sex marriages. As his supporters point out, his success on the state level for those issues bode well for his agenda on the national level.

O’Malley, a Roman Catholic, has the liberal leanings that many Democrats support, such as his stand against capital punishment. While governor, he signed into law a repeal of the death penalty for future offenders.

Immigration reform is among his top issues. Railing against what he described as a broken immigration system that tears families apart and stifles economic growth, at a campaign appearance in July he said he would use aggressive executive action to limit deportations if elected to the White House.

“As Americans, we are good people. And we can do better than this backward, broken immigration process that rips families apart,” O’Malley said.

He vowed to close detention facilities and press Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform that would include a pathway to citizenship for millions who entered the country illegally. He also vowed to expand health care for immigrants and create an independent agency that would work to refine immigration policy.

The moves, he said, would go further than President Barack Obama, who has put into place a series of executive actions aimed at deferring deportations for millions of immigrants in the country illegally, including those who arrived in the United States as young children.

His critics

His tough stance on crime turned into a liability in some voters’ minds. The good news was that murders, which annually topped 300 in Baltimore for years, and violent crime overall declined in O’Malley’s years as mayor. But in that time, a grand jury concluded that too many arrests were being made in black neighborhoods without merit. And the city settled a lawsuit from people who said they were wrongly arrested for minor offenses.

Some think this year’s riots erupted, in part, from years of frustration among residents who felt unfairly targeted.

As Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu wrote earlier this year: “(O’Malley) is blamed by community leaders for 15 years ago implementing a zero-tolerance policy for crime. That has disproportionately hurt young black men, according to Lawrence Bell, the former Baltimore City Council president. It has led to arrests for minor offenses, and helped fuel distrust of law enforcement. After enough indignities and enough deprivations of rights and resources, you might start to believe the rules are different for you than for other people. You might come to see that as its own kind of warfare.”

And for taxpayers who already feel overburdened, he’s been an easy target. His critics say he turned Maryland into an overtaxed state. He raised taxes on multiple occasions — on higher earners, sales of goods, vehicle titles, gasoline, cigarettes, sewer services and more. Republican critics branded him as a tax-and-spend liberal and the GOP defeated O’Malley’s hand-picked successor in 2014.