Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is looking more and more like a possible Democratic presidential candidate and he’s putting some distance between himself and President Obama, particularly on the border crisis and the undocumented children streaming across the borders. Watch out Hillary, maybe the nomination isn’t yours for the taking.

O’Malley believes these children, or “refugees” as he calls them, should be able to make “their case for protection and asylum.” He said sending them back would be “contrary to everything we stand for as a people.”

O’Malley dinged President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying they could “at least have done a better job” of building partnerships with the Central American countries where the children are coming from. These countries are ravaged by gang violence. He said, “We have failed to be good partners and neighbors,” Buzzfeed reports.

Martin O’Malley is presenting himself as an alternative to Hillary Clinton in 2016, if she decides to run. He’s banking on the party dissing Clinton for a second time, as they did in the 2008 presidential elections. He may be a longshot to many, but Hillary Clinton is walking a very tightrope. She risks alienating the base if she runs to the right of President Obama. If she runs to the left of the president, she also runs the risk of torpedoing her carefully crafted reputation as a centrist. That means, O’Malley could get by her and become an appealing candidate.

While Martin O’Malley doesn’t have the charisma of Bill Clinton, the oratorical skills of Barack Obama or the star power of Hillary Clinton, but you can’t count him out. Let’s not forget a relatively obscure Gov. Bill Clinton won the Democratic primaries in 1992 and went on the beating then-president George H.W. Bush after his poll ratings soared in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.

This was cross-posted from The Hinterland Gazette.