Martin O’Malley told a friendly New Hampshire audience on Wednesday that he is still a “potential” presidential candidate, but that the group should “talk to me in three days,” a obvious hint that his potential status could soon end.
The former Maryland governor has long said that he will make a decision on his all-but-announced campaign by the end of the month, but his aides dismissed the idea that O’Malley would announce his campaign on Saturday. Instead, they said, he would likely have his mind made up this weekend.
“I will make a decision very, very shortly,” he said at his first event of the day.
But throughout O’Malley’s day-long swing through New Hampshire it was very clear that the governor is getting closer to a decision. In fact, it’s quite likely footage of O’Malley’s trip will be featured in any campaign launch, should their be one.
Traveling with O’Malley was a nine-person film crew, complete with a director, two cameras, audio and lighting from Siegel Strategies.
“Video recording in progress on 5/13/15,” read a sign outside O’Malley’s last event. “By being here you consent to having your likeness appear on television or the web.”
Members of the crew were also handing out forms for people to sign.
O’Malley’s political action committee recently hired Siegel Strategies to produce videos for them, according to an aide, and the team went to all of the governor’s events on Wednesday, including his closed event with state lawmakers in Concord.
Siegel Strategies is run by Jimmy Siegel, a media consultant and political ad maker who has, according to his biography, worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
But O’Malley spent much of his day differentiating himself from his party’s presidential frontrunner.
“Fear not,” O’Malley said, projecting as he closed his remarks at a house party in Durham. “We are moving ahead, we aren’t going back.”
“I see things in a way that are much more in tune with where our country is going rather than where our country has come from,” he said.
Before the house party, the crew had their cameras set up down the street for what they said was going to be a staged scene on one of the city’s quaint streets.
According to multiple members of the crew, the team had scripted a scene where O’Malley would run down the street and pass two people who would turn to each other and ask, “Who is running?”
After checking the lighting, a member of the crew mimicked O’Malley running and saying, “I’m running.”
The crew, who stood on the street for around an hour, said they had purchased O’Malley a running outfit for the scene. But when the governor’s maroon SUV pulled up and noticed a reporter standing with the crew, a staffer got out car and told the team to scrap the plan and head to the house party down the street.
The staffer who called off the plan would not give a reason, but a member of the crew said it was because the shoot was no longer private.
Lis Smith, O’Malley’s top political strategist, dismissed the idea that the governor was planning to film any running video that would have been used on an ad or announcement video.