Merely suggesting there was another way to address the issue of drugs in urban America cost Schmoke much of the credibility and political capital he’d been building since he was fourteen years old. Within less than a year, he’d been transformed in the public imagination from a brilliant young politician with proven leadership on urban crime to a naïve idealist who was in over his head in Baltimore, “a brilliant spokesman for a bad idea,” as New York mayor Ed Koch described him. Indeed, the rebuke was so immediate and intense that Schmoke began jokingly introducing himself when speaking
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