THIS WAS TWO months ago at Iggy's Restaurant, Eastern Avenue and High Street, early on the morning of Maryland's primary election. Gathered around a bunch of tables shoved together were maybe 20 people, all allegedly Democrats, including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and William Donald Schaefer. And then, in walked Patricia C. Jessamy.
"Here she is," Schaefer called out.
Jessamy, the embattled Baltimore state's attorney in the fight of her political life, sat down at one end of the gathering, between Townsend and Schaefer. A veil of merriment covered the tension that all politicians feel on Election Day.
"Oh, my God," Schaefer said. "It's heart-wrenching, it's nerve-wracking. You never get used to it."
All this, after four decades of running for office, and winning and winning, and on this day he would sail to another easy victory. But the dread was with him like a sickness, and it was tempered only by odd moments.
Such as Gene Raynor's arrival a few moments after Jessamy's. Raynor, the former Board of Elections chief, was now running Schaefer's re-election campaign for comptroller. The morning was sunny and warm. Raynor strolled in wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Schaefer let him have it right away.
"Here's Raynor, who didn't even have time to put pants on," Schaefer said.
"I don't have time to be sitting around eating breakfast, either," Raynor said.
Then, amid the stifled laughter of these 20 people who had elections to handle, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend turned to Patricia C. Jessamy.
"How do you deal with this?" she asked.
"I meditate," Jessamy said.
"Medicate?" Schaefer said.
"Meditate," Jessamy said again. Then she addressed the whole table, where old-line Democrats such as Raynor and Alan Fleischmann, and Laney Lebow-Sachs and Mark Wasserman, and Bob Douglass and Domenick Leone Jr., listened.
"We're all going to meditate together," Jessamy said. "Ready? Three times. Aaaahmmm."
The whole crowd at the table joined in, and the sound could be heard onto the street.
"Aaahhhmmm. Ahhhmmm."
"There you go," somebody called out when it was over. "We're all New Age Democrats now."
Indeed, it is a new age for Maryland's Democrats -- and Republicans, too.
For here we are, two days before the general election, and Gene Raynor has been running around town urging everyone to vote for Republican Robert Ehrlich, and Domenick Leone Jr., the son of the former Democratic city councilman, has been working for Ehrlich, and when Schaefer is asked about some of his oldest friends, such as Lou Grasmick and John Paterakis, supporting Ehrlich, he says it's their business, not his.
The political business of Maryland is rumbling and shifting. In the last half-century, only two Republicans have been elected governor: Spiro Agnew in the 1960s, who posed as a moderate against a race-baiting Democrat; and Theodore McKeldin in the 1950s, who seemed like a liberal Democrat in Republican trappings to many who supported him.
And now there is Ehrlich, who runs for office in a state with 2-to-1 Democratic registration, appealing openly to Democrats, and wooing them successfully enough that a couple of polls last week showed him with a slight lead over Townsend and one private poll showed her with a slight lead over him.
For all who believe in a two-party system, this is excellent news: We have a real choice. For a long time around here, the Republicans have thrown lambs to the slaughter in races across the state. This time, they've got a congressman. He runs against a lieutenant governor. This is a legitimate race.
So why do so many of us, finally given a legitimate piece of the democratic process, approach Election Day with so much dread and uneasiness?
Answer: Because, though the process is healthier, finally giving Republicans and Democrats each a legitimate shot, the campaign itself has not exalted anybody. If it has called us to our better instincts, nobody has noticed.
Ehrlich's TV ads have criticized a "corrupt" Democratic administration -- but nobody's ever connected Townsend to the slightest hint of corruption. And he does this while embracing such disgraced Democrats as Clarence Mitchell IV and Bruce Bereano. Townsend's got radio ads, mainly on stations aimed at black audiences, where an African-American announcer says Ehrlich voted against "civil rights, voting rights." But Ehrlich's not even old enough to have cast a vote on somebody else's right to vote.
Ehrlich's tried to blame Townsend for the horrible fire-bombing that killed an East Baltimore family. There's a case to be made for criminal justice without tying an opponent to such devastation. Townsend trumpeted affirmative action by harking back to the dread days of lynching. There's a case to be made for affirmative action without tying an opponent to such devastation.
In many ways, this marks a new age for Democrats and Republicans. But too much of the language, and the empty charges, and the overheated rhetoric from both sides, give voters the kind of pre-Election Day uneasiness nobody wants.