Maryland's new governor may be the Democrats' most talented newcomer since Barack Obama. mollyesque reports on where Wes Moore comes from—and where Democrats see him going
“Patriots,” Wes Moore says, pausing for effect. The room falls silent; the slot machines in the lobby are quiet. “I’m thankful that I’m in a room full of people who understand what that word means.”
Moore hands bags of food out to individuals during a visit to the Ruth M. Kirk Recreation and Learning Center in BaltimoreFor Democrats, the promise Moore represents can’t come too soon. The party’s stronger-than-expected midterms did little to quell its underlying angst: an aging cast of top leaders, a widening cultural gulf with working-class voters, and a brand yoked in the public mind to unpopular left-wing ideas.
By reframing patriotism, Moore hopes to do more than just make a political pitch for himself and his party. It’s an unabashed plea for a new political culture, one in which we can dare to think of government as a shared enterprise and force for good, and politics as an avenue to achieve it. If he can love America, he suggests, anyone can; by believing in him, we can once again believe in this complicated and difficult nation, find a shared faith that bridges our bitter divides.
Moore was born in the liberal D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Md. His father was a local journalist who met his mother, a Jamaican immigrant, when she came to work for his radio show. When young Westley was not quite 4, his father, feeling woozy and struggling to breathe, drove himself to the emergency room, where perplexed doctors asked the panicked, disheveled-looking Black man whether he might be exaggerating and sent him home with painkillers.
Moore stayed at Valley Forge after finishing high school, accepting a commission in the Army and earning an associate’s degree at the school’s junior college. His mother moved back to the Baltimore suburbs for her job at a foundation for at-risk youth. Moore began spending time in the city and felt at home, he says. But he didn’t have a Baltimore address until he transferred to Johns Hopkins his junior year.
Real, too, Moore says, was the sense of belonging he found in Baltimore when he began spending time there as a teen, hanging out with his sister and her school friends on breaks from Valley Forge. He interned twice for then mayor Kurt Schmoke, an early mentor who pushed him to apply for the Rhodes. “I finally get to a place that accepts me, flaws and all,” he says. “That became home, and it will always be home.
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