Melvin (Mickey) Steinberg slips away, at 92, and I’m left with a lovely memory of Maryland’s former lieutenant governor when he walked into the old Louie’s Book Store Café, on North Charles Street, and decided to charm a bunch of elementary school kids.
He was running for the Democratic nomination for governor on that summer afternoon back in 1994. The kids weren’t old enough to vote, but maybe they’d go home and say a good word to Mom and Dad.
“Are your parents Democrats or Republicans?” he asked.
“Yes,” the kids yelled in full political obliviousness.
Steinberg rolled his eyes a little. He didn’t want a yes, he wanted a poll. He asked the kids what they were doing there. They were members of the Carroll County Children’s Chorus, they said.
“We are marching in the light of God,” they sang for the next couple of minutes.
“Superb,” Steinberg told them when they were finished. The kids took little bows. Then Steinberg, with typical puckish sense of humor, offered a little advice.
“A political tip,” he said, with the wisdom that comes from 30 years in government and politics.
He grabbed a baseball cap off a little kid’s head.
“While everybody’s singing,” he said, “you gotta have one guy walk around, and he holds out his cap. And people put money in the cap. That’s how I made it, see? It’s tough raising money, but this will work, I promise.”
In general, it was a pretty good lesson. But, in this election, whatever money he was raising, he came up a little short vote-wise and we wound up with Parris Glendening for eight years as governor.
It would have been nice to have Mickey running the state. He was William Donald Schaefer’s lieutenant governor for a term, but it was a frustrating experience for both men and they parted ways, not exactly amicably.
But Steinberg would have been an interesting governor. He was smart as hell, but he also had a good heart. He was a great schmoozer, regardless of party. And, for the bulk of his life, he was a classic liberal Democrat.
In other words, he came from people who once felt like outsiders, who felt marginalized by American politics, until those such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson began making the political game more inclusive for minorities of all kinds.
He was part of a generation that remembered labor union fights and medical school quotas and restricted clubs, and one party finding a semblance of enlightenment while the other dragged its heels.
That’s why it was so stunning when Steinberg later bolted parties and backed Republican Ellen Sauerbrey’s bid to become governor of Maryland.
Actually, “stunning” doesn’t quite cover the reaction among Democrats. In the immediate aftermath of Steinberg’s announcement, four Democrats (all Jewish) held a press conference in Pikesville to denounce that choice.
So let’s remember Mickey Steinberg in better times: schmoozing happily with people in both parties, putting a human heart behind the cold business of politics, and pausing in the midst of a hot political campaign to offer a gentle lesson to a bunch of little kids.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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