Jeered and discounted by her Democratic brothers and sisters for 16 years, Ellen Richmond Sauerbrey dared to think this year finally she would play Cinderella. She would preside at an Overthrow Ball with fiscal responsibility the obvious theme. She would draw up the invitation list, pushing out Democratic deadwood, adding GOP faces in their stead.
The big event will occur as always on Jan. 20, but Mrs. Sauerbrey won't be there in the lead role.
In results she still disputes, the 57-year-old steel worker's daughter fell short by a little over 5,000 votes out of 1.4 million cast.
"It's a bit painful," she concedes. Friends and backers say she hides the hurt with the strength she showed during the campaign.
She refuses to acknowledge that her Democratic rival, Parris N. Glendening, is the winner nearly two weeks after Election Day. She and her partisans allege widespread ballot irregularities, a broad and calculated effort to steal the election. They want a careful examination of all the election apparatus from paper to machine.
So far, their opponents say, the Republicans have offered no substantial proof, a charge the Sauerbrey forces find almost as maddening as the thought that they came so close and lost. How can they offer evidence when the Democrat-controlled election boards, the Democratic attorney general and Democrat-appointed judges refuse them access to records that might yield what they seek?
But they know there are only a few more grains of sand in the hourglass of public patience.
"You can feel the public support draining away," says David Blumberg, chairman of the party in Baltimore.
"We live in a 15-second, sound bite world. People get antsy. They want to move on."
Within the Sauerbrey camp, within the broader circle of Maryland Republicans, the harsh truth of these circumstances is slowly reaching the level of acceptance or acquiescence. They know how it looks from afar, from outside, and they are angry.
Even the columnist George Will, whose support buoyed them in the summer, now says they should retire gracefully.
Mrs. Sauerbrey understands all of this. She also says the critics don't really understand her determination to press the inquiry.
"I honestly could not rest until we feel we have satisfied ourselves about the validity or lack of it in literally hundreds of reports of irregularities that have come in to the office," she says.
She couldn't live with the knowledge that she hadn't pushed the investigation far enough.
"We have an obligation to the people who supported me, worked for me and the people of the state to be able to feel assured and give them assurances that the election was a fair one."
But she knows very well what people are saying:
* That all of this makes her a whiner and sore loser. Very unfair, says Mr. Blumberg.
"Ellen really doesn't have a dirty or suspicious mind when it comes to politics. They don't have walking-around money or flush teams along Sweetair Road."
He is referring to Mrs. Sauerbrey's home in Baltimore County and to the Baltimore practice of paying people to distribute ballots on Election Day and to drag the laggards to their voting machines.
* That her campaign essentially ignored black voters -- and now targets black voting precincts as the main sites of the suspected fraud.
Mrs. Sauerbrey says the perception that she is questioning only black votes and black precincts is wrong. Questions have arisen many parts of the state, but she says Baltimore and Montgomery County are the principal sites.
"The precincts we are questioning in the city are not all predominantly black. We didn't look to see where they were or if they were black or white," she says.
'Strange characteristics'
"We looked for strange characteristics [a larger than normal turnout, for example, or no votes for the ballot questions]. We didn't know where else to look. . . . We have pages and pages of city voters registered as living in boarded-up buildings and vacant lots."
The perception that Republicans discounted and disparaged blacks was projected yet again when Dr. Ross Z. Pierpont announced a "ballot security" task force -- without the knowledge or support of the Sauerbrey team.
He chose to call his group the "Knights and Dames of Freedom," a label that seemed to evoke the Knights of the KKK.
Mr. Blumberg says Democrats tell him that Dr. Pierpont's sally into the campaign infuriated blacks and accelerated the turnout.
* That she is paranoid.
Mrs. Sauerbrey knows her critics say she is jumping at every shadow, rumor, report and legalistic finding of error.
The questions should be directed elsewhere, she says.
"If they're so clean," says her spokeswoman, Carol L. Hirschburg, "why do they care if we look at the records?"
It may seem reasonable to the world at large, Mrs. Sauerbrey says, to put off her inquiry until the final tally has been made. But she says delay hurts: After the totals are recorded, after the results are officially certified, after the Glendening team sprints into its transition with its man the governor-elect, where does a protest find support?
Last Monday, she says, Baltimore election officials and Assistant Attorney General Richard Israel assured her team of observers that they could see cards signed on Election Day and compare them with the signatures on file for those voters. Representatives of the Glendening campaign objected and the Baltimore elections board voted 2-to-1 against granting the access.
"We felt we had no choice but to go to court," she says, recognizing yet again that she seemed to be obstructing.
She adds: "A whole battery of attorneys paid for by my tax dollars were in court fighting my ability to access these records -- and seeming to [be] overturning what Mr. Israel had said in the morning. If they had said, 'Go look at the records, make a fool of yourselves,' we would have gone and looked. If there was nothing, we'd have no further issue to discuss. It would have been over."
That didn't happen, she observes, so the inquiry continues.
* That she is ruining the bright future she could have in Maryland politics.
"She's thought about that very deeply," says Ms. Hirschburg. "But she feels there's a principle involved.
"They want her to think about that. They want her to cave."
The sense she conveys is that she does not expect to run again. But decisions of that sort can wait.
* That her protest deepens cynicism about politics and elections, adding to suspicions about the election process.
"You can't blame her for checking, especially if she knows she won't run again," says Mr. Blumberg.
As for the rest of the party, he adds, "We're not so stupid we didn't know this was our year."
Bitter feelings
The conviction that the numbers were manipulated finds ample support in Republican councils, where the bitter feelings are expressed even more vociferously in support of a candidate who risked so much, ran so well and came so close.
On the strength of her campaign for governor and riding the wave of public support for change in the government, Maryland Republicans elected eight new state senators and 15 new members of the House of Delegates on Nov. 8. When Mrs. Sauerbrey went to the House 16 years ago, she had 13 Republican colleagues. Next year, the total will be at least 40.
That result is pleasing, but she has had little time to think about it.
She and her party are enmeshed in a tangle of rumor and accusation that takes root readily in the GOP's history of running second to the scornful Democrats.
"They're the home team," Mr. Blumberg says. "They bat last. We don't get up until the lights are off and everyone has gone home."
D8 C. Fraser Smith is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.