A correspondent makes a good point about today's column about Maryland Business for Responsive Government. MBRG, traditionally the purist, free-markets business advocacy group, is rebranding itself as "centrist." This happens every now and then in Maryland. In the 1990s the Maryland Chamber of Commerce hired Champe McCullough as president and ordered him to kick butt against the Democratic machine, only to change its mind.
But one of Maryland businesses' larger problems, my correspondent points out, is its reluctance to personally engage in Annapolis. Instead it hires proxies like MBRG and the chamber. MBRG's co-chairmen are former Democratic Gov. Marvin Mandel and Ellen Sauerbrey, who narrowly missed becoming the state's Rebublican governor in the 1990s. Politicians, not business folks. MBRG's new president, Kim Burns, has been a lobbyist for most of her career.
The CEOs who call the business shots are rarely seen in Annapolis.
