Jim Smith announced Monday afternoon that he would forgo the comptroller's race in 2010, ending months of speculation about his political future. He said he'll look for ways to serve in the future but that his heart wasn't in a run for that office:

"After much deliberation, I have decided not to run for Comptroller in the 2010 election.  Although this has not been an easy decision, I am confident that I am making the right choice. Having spent many months thinking about the duties of Comptroller in the State of Maryland, I have concluded that it is not a position to which I aspire. I have never pursued any elected office because it was expedient. I always sought the opportunity to serve because I thought I could make a real difference -- as a councilman, a judge, and currently as County Executive. I did not feel that passion when considering a run for Comptroller."

That says something good about the man who has been running Baltimore County for the last seven years. Set aside for the moment the question of whether he would have been a good comptroller or a bad one, whether he would have won or lost against incumbent Peter Franchot, or whether Gov. Martin O'Malley did or didn't want him to run. The simple fact that a politician chose not to run for a higher office that he had no real interest in is, sad as this may be to say, refreshing.

Jim's 2002 race for county executive was the first big election I covered for The Sun. We got to know each other in the early days, when he would pop into our Towson office after going to the gym next door. It was a rare period in his adult life when he was not a county councilman, judge or county executive. Just, for a moment, a private citizen.

That campaign didn't set the world on fire -- it's major legacy was the unfortunate and repeated use of the word "renaissance" as a verb -- but Jim had a certain engaging earnestness about him. He was a Baltimore County guy through and through -- born and raised there, leaving only briefly to go to college, and then coming back to raise a family in Resisterstown. The only chink in his bona fides, according to a story he once told me on the way to a campaign stop, was that in high school, he dumped "a hot little number from Randallstown" in favor of his future wife, Sandy, whom he met while she was cheerleading at a basketball game in Westminster.

He could quite comfortably have spent the rest of his career on the bench, but, he said, he wanted to serve the county more directly. Being county executive, he insisted at the time, was no steppingstone to something else for him. He wanted that job, and that was it.

Over his two terms, as the county continued to run smoothly and he continued to amass political cash and clout, people started whispering into his ear about statewide office. There's no way to know whether the state would have been well or ill served by such a move, but it always disappointed me a little to think that the man I'd met with the seemingly simple purpose had been won over by years of chauffered cars and hangers-on.

There is something to be said for ambition in our elected officials. People looking to move up might be extra aggressive in trying to be innovative in their current jobs. Sometimes people grow into offices they don't inherently have much interest in -- Smith's predecessor Dutch Ruppersberger, for example, has developed a surprising relish for his work as a congressman, despite some ambivalence when he first decided to run for the post. And maybe there's more to Smith's decision than his announcement lets on.

But it's nice to think that something essential about the Jim Smith I met eight years ago remains in the man today. 

(AP Photo)