As tales of woe from his campaign for governor have accumulated in recent months, Melvin A. Steinberg, Maryland's amiable lieutenant governor, has found himself lapsing into parable, a modern-day political one.
There's this candidate, he tells the doubters. All day he's out campaigning, shaking hands, kissing babies -- old-time retail politics. He gets back to his hotel, snaps on the television. Some woman's on the screen. She's talking about him and their secret life together. If you're the guy, you've got no choice. You thank everybody, pack your bags, go home.
Except the guy didn't go home, says Mr. Steinberg. Instead, he hung in there.
"And today," he says, grinning impishly, barreling toward the punch line, "today they call him Mr. President."
His eyes flit left and right as he delivers the kicker, as if to say, "Does anybody see any parallels here between Bill Clinton, down but not out after the Gennifer Flowers episode, and, say, Mickey Steinberg?"
That is Mr. Steinberg's line of choice these days, that he is politically resilient, a sturdy distance runner capable of weathering the fits and starts of a campaign that for all its high-priced talent has at times seen him looking like a candidate for the glue factory rather than the apparent front-runner in the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Troubles or not, he looks better these days, having dropped 25 pounds, transforming his characteristic jelly-bean torso into something within cannon range of slim.
"I don't want to win this on my sex appeal," Mr. Steinberg, 60, says with mock seriousness when complimented on his appearance. "I want to win this on my substance."
Substance is not the problem. In many respects he is the polar opposite of the Robert Redford character in the 1972 movie "The Candidate," in which Mr. Redford plays a content-free hunk elected to the U.S. Senate by going along with the advice of cynical, media-savvy political handlers.
"Marvin, what do we do now?" asks the new senator, his victory assured, in the film's last line.
Few who have followed Mr. Steinberg's career as a legislator, state Senate president and lieutenant governor doubt he would know what to do as governor.
Over the years he has built an enviable record of accomplishment, especially as Senate president and during the first term in his present job, before the bitter 1991 split with Gov. William Donald Schaefer over taxes that left Mr. Steinberg isolated and bereft of duties.
But his uneven campaign performance to date has raised questions among political observers, including some of his strongest supporters, about his ability to win the state's highest office.
Most noticeably, he failed to make good on his high-profile pledge to play a major role at the annual 90-day session of the Maryland General Assembly that concluded Monday.
Session viewed as forum
On Jan. 7, five days before legislators convened in Annapolis, Mr. Steinberg said in an interview that he intended to use the session as a forum to vigorously promote issues central to his campaign.
"I see this as a session of real opportunity to focus on the burning issues that we as a society have to address," he said. "I am prepared to speak out candidly on every issue involving public safety, education and economic development and to get them enacted as soon as possible."
Instead, he was largely irrelevant to the action, his presence at the State House marked by little more than his arrivals and departures en route to the second-floor office where he presides over a staff of three.
To the extent he surfaced in any noticeable way in Annapolis during the session, it was through his advocacy of a $2-a-pack cigarette tax, an initiative treated as election-year bombast by a skeptical General Assembly.
Mr. Steinberg's timing fed that skepticism.
On Monday, Jan. 10, Mr. Steinberg officially kicked off his campaign for governor, traveling to various parts of the state over a two-day period, laying out a platform in which smoking was never mentioned.
Two days later, on Jan. 12, news reports said Governor Schaefer planned to propose a 25-cents-a-pack cigarette tax increase in hopes of discouraging smoking, particularly by young people.
Calls for bigger increase
That same day, Mr. Steinberg, going the governor better by a factor of eight, called for his $2-a-pack increase -- even though it was clear that Mr. Schaefer's far more modest proposal was likely to fail, as it eventually did.
"I think the $2-a-pack cigarette thing was a no-brainer," said Sen. Julian L. Lapides, a Baltimore Democrat who is fond of Mr. Steinberg, but has not endorsed any of the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls. "Realistically, it's absurd, even if it's the right thing to do."
Mr. Steinberg acknowledged that his proposal was triggered by news reports of the governor's initiative.
In making that admission, he portrayed it as skillfully exploiting a target of opportunity, a lucrative one that might save lives.
His cigarette tax proposal did afford him a rare chance to make a small splash at the session, which he did at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing.
Accusing the tobacco industry of targeting children, he leaped to his feet and pulled out a small yellow jacket bearing the likeness of "Joe the Camel," a cartoon character created by Camel cigarettes.
"This is for adults?" he asked, peering down his nose at the jacket.
Efforts overshadowed
Mr. Steinberg said he was active at the session, but agreed that he made a "midcourse correction" upon realizing that his efforts were being overshadowed by debate about the Washington Redskins' proposed move to Laurel and other State House activity.
So he took his campaign on the road, traveling throughout the state, putting in 16-hour days at receptions and small fund-raisers as well as participating in what he calls "issues retreats" with various experts to help him formulate elements of his platform.
The past three months were notable for Mr. Steinberg in other unhappy ways.
In March, he passed up a candidates forum called by the Legislative Black Caucus, leading the chairman,Del. John D. Jefferies, a Baltimore Democrat, to say the caucus felt "snubbed" by his absence.
The forum, in fact, was set up on short notice, but Mr. Steinberg's explanation, delivered through an aide, did little to ease bruised feelings. He was said to be meeting with prospective out-of-town contributors to his campaign.
By contrast, his closest current rival for the nomination, Prince George's County Executive Parris N. Glendening, canceled an Ocean City fund-raiser scheduled for the same time so he could participate in the forum.
A few days earlier Mr. Steinberg's campaign manager, Kevin Mack, had quit after barely two months on the job amid reports that he felt Mr. Steinberg was trying to micro-manage the campaign.
Earlier debacle
The lieutenant governor's reaction was to demote Mr. Mack after the fact, saying he was not the campaign manager, but rather the office manager, despite a Steinberg press release of early January to the contrary.
Mr. Mack's departure recalled the debacle late last year of an earlier split between Mr. Steinberg and a senior campaign aide, Theodore G. Venetoulis, the former Baltimore county executive.
Mr. Venetoulis was not his campaign manager, either, Mr. Steinberg said, even though he had contracted to pay him up to $250,000 through the September primary. The two men are now suing one another.
As for micro-managing, Mr. Steinberg denies it, but said that after running and winning elections since 1966 he has no intention of fading into the woodwork, especially with the stakes at play.
"I don't have handlers run my life or make my basic decisions," he said. "I'm not a puppet, and I'm not a muldoon."
Mr. Steinberg -- the only statewide officeholder in the race -- remains the front-runner in a crowded field, but even that seemingly enviable status has had its drawbacks.
A year ago, it seemed possible he would pre-empt the field. Instead his troubles have worked like a magnet, drawing three new candidates into the race since December and setting the stage for a fourth, Stewart Bainum Jr., a millionaire Montgomery County businessman and former House and Senate member who is expected to announce in the next few weeks. Even Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos is thinking about running.
There have been other recent developments that have cut into Mr. Steinberg's political credibility.
A March poll matching the six announced Democrat candidates for governor showed Mr. Steinberg taking only 30 percent of the vote in his political base, Baltimore County, while a late-starting dark horse, state Sen. American Joe Miedusiewski of Baltimore, claimed 15 percent. The others were in single digits.
State FOP backs rival
And last week, Maryland's police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, endorsed Mr. Glendening over Mr. Steinberg on a 17-16 vote of its board, throwing its fund-raising and organizational resources behind the Prince George's county executive. Mr. Steinberg's supporters have threatened to appeal the endorsement on grounds of alleged procedural irregularities.
There may also be money problems. Although Mr. Steinberg's campaign has raised over $1 million, there have been reports that he has had to dip into his own pocket.
Mr. Steinberg denied any difficulty in financing the campaign, but confirmed that he is spending a good deal of his own money on his election effort.
"I'm talking into the thousands," he said. "Cash dollars, a substantial amount of my own cash dollars."
For the moment, discussions of Mr. Steinberg's campaign invariably produce a shaking of heads, from friends and adversaries alike, as if they can't understand why he has failed to seize control of the race.
"The election was his to lose, and remains so," said Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., Mr. Steinberg's successor as Senate president.
As for Mr. Steinberg, he seems confident that when it counts, the voters will tilt toward seasoning and experience even if his campaign occasionally resembles a dysfunctional vaudeville troupe.
"We're not talking about voting for a homecoming queen," he says. "What I'm doing is plugging along, taking my case to the people."