GOVERNING FROM THE MIDDLE: Maryland’s Larry Hogan.

I ran for office saying everybody was going to be included, it was going to be one Maryland. We weren’t just gonna focus on just one area, we’ve invested more money in Baltimore City, and Prince George’s, and Montgomery County than ever before. But they had already been getting a lot of attention.

The ones that had not are where we’ve been focused. They have issues like heroin. When I was running for governor, going to Cumberland and Hagerstown were the most shocking things to me. Because you know, I went to every little community, I went to every small town everywhere, I went to all 24 counties and jurisdictions, probably almost every little town. I thought, what is going on here?

When we were running the first time we had no money in our campaign. It was this whole grassroots effort and I just said, “I’m going to talk to everybody, everywhere.” Every place I went I would sit down with local community leaders, maybe some of the elected officials in the town, the local business leaders, and I would sit them down in a restaurant or town hall or something. I would say, “what are the serious problems that are facing your community?” And I thought I would hear, you know education, or transportation, or we need help with our economy and jobs, but what I heard in Cumberland and I heard in Hagerstown, and then I started to hear everywhere was heroin.

Read the whole thing. It’s from Salena Zito.