Always Good to Hear From Ben Cardin

Suddenly, Sen. Ben Cardin seems to be everywhere.

There he is, on CNN, talking about possible ties between the Trump administration and Russia. There he is, on MSNBC, talking about the Republican attempt to sneak their health care initiatives into play while nobody’s watching.

And there he is, on the Politico web site, worrying about America stumbling into one more avoidable war, unless that man in the White House, Donald Trump, prisoner to his every strident impulse, can listen to calmer voices.

As the world grows increasingly anxious from crises in Syria and North Korea, and Ukraine and the South China Sea, Cardin tells Politico that President Trump shows himself to be “very irrational, against U.S. interests, and unpredictable.”

All of which, says Cardin, “raises a concern as to whether he will do the right thing under pressure. There’s many areas where there could be a miscalculation that could lead to a shooting war. In every one of those circumstances, the Trump administration has not given us a strategy.”

What’s noteworthy about all of this isn’t Cardin having opinions. It’s that he’s expressing them so publicly. He’s one of the brightest people on Capitol Hill. But over the years, the senior senator from Maryland has mostly been a muted, temperate, often cautious voice, from his time in the state legislature to his days in the House of Representatives through his early tenure in the U.S. Senate.

In that sense, he’s part of a modern Maryland tradition. Paul Sarbanes, one of the most studious men in the Senate, never saw a TV camera he didn’t instinctively avoid. Barbara Mikulski, for all her command of street-corner patois, softened her verbal edges somewhere between southeast Baltimore and Capitol Hill.

With Cardin, part of what feels like a higher public profile obviously comes with stature as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But seniority never overtly affected Sarbanes or Mikulski. They never ran for the bright lights at the first sight of TV cameras (unlike, say, Maryland’s newest senator, Chris Van Hollen, who’s been a cable news presence from some of his earliest days on Capitol Hill.)

For those who have watched Cardin since his days in Maryland’s House of Delegates – and recall him as the youngest Speaker of the House in state history – it’s comforting, in the midst of Washington’s daily chaos, to hear his calm, thoughtful insights.

Especially now, with that man in the White House so unpredictable and so easily given to impulse.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).