“Patriots,” Wes Moore says, pausing for effect. The room falls silent; the slot machines in the lobby are quiet. “I’m thankful that I’m in a room full of people who understand what that word means.”
About 80 military veterans sit at plastic-clothed tables in front of a bar topped with metal buckets of Coors Light. It’s a chilly January night at an American Legion hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Moore is wearing a tie but no jacket, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. In a few days, the 44-year-old will be sworn in as Maryland’s first Black governor-the third elected in American history and the only one currently serving. Tonight he has come to this mostly red, mostly white swath of an otherwise very blue, very Black state to connect with his soon-to-be constituents. “Patriotism is not waving a flag around,” Moore says. “Patriotism is not telling our neighbors that we are better than them. Patriots-this is our time to get this right.”
Moore’s theme is both a product and a through line of a remarkable biography. Growing up fatherless and surrounded by violence, he turned his life around, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He’s a decorated Army combat veteran, a best-selling author of inspirational memoirs, and a former Wall Street banker, small businessman, and nonprofit CEO. Just weeks into his first term in elected office, he is widely considered the Democrats’ most talented political newcomer since Barack Obama.
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