We went door-to-door the Sunday after Trump’s inaugration, canvassing Baltimore city neighborhoods. Luke took notes. This was his district. After six years in the Maryland House of Delegates, Luke was championing a sick leave bill. He knew the value of taking time to heal.
“If sick leave is good enough for me, it’s good enough for 700,000 Marylanders,” he told the Washington Post.
Luke broke the sad news to me when I arrived in Annapolis days before the transition of power. He had been battling leukemia, lost a lot of weight and was taking one super expensive pill a day to send the blood cancer into remission.
Canvassing Baltimore
“I was just tired all the time,” he recalled.
It was a compelling story for those slowed before by a serious condition. And who hasn’t? I recall the words of an ex-lover as reason to keep fighting.
“It’s not how you fall, John, it’s how you pick yourself up,” Warren told me.
I quizzed Luke the entire week as to why Democrats don’t win elections anymore. For a prosecutor, I’m sure this constant questioning was wearing thin. On my last night in Baltimore, as we walked into a local pub, Luke muttered “I didn’t know you were going to be here this long.”
He had graciously solved my housing dilemma but having a reporter shadow you for a week is walking a tightrope. Inside this dingy pub, where rowdy Baltimorians got drunk and watched sports on television, Luke offered a profound statement as to the party’s woes.
“Sometimes we want to be the smartest people in the room more than we want to win,” Luke said.
I imagined a room full of consultants in Washington, Tallahassee or Annapolis. Fancy suits, new dresses, pretty and, seemingly perfect. Some no doubt were lobbyists and all had their agenda.
Then I thought about the day I spent with Luke walking real neighborhoods where those “smart” consultants just don’t go. The issues we found are numbers on a piece of paper to them. Statistics to prove a point of view. Isn’t that all politics is anymore? One argument after another.
What we saw were real people, some living ok and some not. Conditions change from state to state, we are told. The look of the poor is clearly recognizable.
In one part of Baltimore, an old Irish enclave called Brooklyn, we witnessed the very problems Trump had spoken of as he took the Presidential oath. “The crime, the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and right now,” Trump said on the steps of the Capitol on a cold and dreary inaugration day.
His speech was such a dark opening to a new chapter in American history. The streets were nearly empty after the ceremony. I had no trouble taking the train back to Maryland.
The next day, DC was flooded by marchers — mostly women dressed in pink “pussy” hats. It was night and day different than the inauguration ceremony…. It was the first step in a resistence.
Women on the March
Slice of Good Ol Boy Life 
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