Just over a year into his administration, Gov. Martin O'Malley finds himself pinned to a hard reality: cleaning up the financial mess left by his predecessors while trying to cope with a faltering economy.

Instead of credit for that dual rescue mission, he faces critics who say he's done too little cost-cutting and too much taxing.

"One of the frustrating realities is that a penny tax increase in the sales tax makes a banner headline, and $100 million in cuts gets barely a whisper," he said during at interview in his State House office.

He's hoping to counter criticism by asking Marylanders to realize how much worse things could be. "I think we have to distinguish between the avalanche of red ink we were able to avoid by attacking the deficit we inherited and the cyclical downturn, which will always happen," Mr. O'Malley said.

Without last November's special legislation session - in which a $1.7 billion deficit was eased by raising the sales and income taxes - the economic slowdown would do much more damage. It's already threatened the state's effort to save the Chesapeake Bay, to invest in potentially lifesaving stem cell research and to hold the line on tuition increases at state colleges and universities.

"We're far better off than we would be if we were trying to close not only the cyclical downturn gap ... [but] not facing up to the deficit we inherited," the governor said. "So, no matter how difficult this is, we're in far better shape than we would have been."

Still, his standing in the opinion polls dropped sharply after the tax increases, leaving him in a funk.

"The cause of my being down is not the poll numbers," he said. "It's the challenges we face. You go to 20 line-of-duty funerals for young people coming home from Iraq. You look at the dollar being weakened. ... It's difficult to be a thinking, caring, rational, moral human being and not be aware of the sadness contained in our shared reality."

If increasing taxes was damaging to his standing, he said, time will heal the wounds.

"I think people are smart, and no matter how unpopular certain actions are, over time people get a clear sense of whether you're acting in the best interests of all of us over the long term - or whether you're trying to skate and put your finger to the wind and do what's easy," Mr. O'Malley said.

When he begins to look for more budget cuts now, he said, he tries to factor in the pressure on Maryland families. State revenues for the next 16 months are expected to be $330 million less than previous estimates.

"These are difficult times for everybody. There isn't a family that isn't feeling the pinch, the squeeze, the declining value of the dollar," Mr. O'Malley said.

Given the financial downturn, the governor seems to have dropped any ambivalence about legalizing slot machines. In the past, he's called slots a poor way to finance important state services. But he has begun to use some of the language of his predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

"In a more perfect world, we wouldn't have slots," he said. "But one of the inescapable facts that most of us have come to accept over the last few years ... is that a lot of Maryland money does leave Maryland for the coffers of Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia. I think, unfortunately, it's a sort of 'can't beat 'em, join 'em.'"

Something the governor can watch without reluctance, he said, is the Democratic Party's "unprecedented" presidential nominating process: "You have Senator [Hillary] Clinton and Senator [Barack] Obama, both offering exciting, compelling candidacies that we've never before seen in our country."

Mr. O'Malley, a superdelegate and early backer of Mrs. Clinton, endorsed the idea of a ticket that includes both contenders.

"I don't think [people] are voting against either of these candidates. I think they're voting for the candidate they like the best. And that's a good sign," he said.

As for his more immediate concern - the economy - he said, "I think we do have a much better ability to control our destiny moving forward, and that's what's going to get us through this recession much more quickly than other states."

Clarification: When I wrote last week that President Bush "didn't win a majority of the popular vote," I was referring to the 2000 election. He won a slim majority of the popular vote in 2004.

C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays in The Sun. His e-mail is fsmith@wypr.org.