There is no doubt Otis Rolley is an extraordinary person. Born in Jersey City, N.J., and raised by his mother, he excelled in an urban public high school, went to Rutgers University, and got himself on national television by his junior year. He decamped to MIT, graduated with honors with a master’s degree in city planning, grabbed a small-time, federally funded economic development job in Baltimore in 1998 and, 18 months after he started working for Baltimore Housing, rose to first deputy commissioner. By age 25, Rolley was in charge of 2,000 employees and a budget of $100 million.

“He kept giving me more and more responsibility, and I was too young to know I couldn’t do it,” Rolley says of Victor Hoskins, his mentor at Baltimore Housing (currently Washington, D.C.’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development).

Then Mayor Martin O’Malley made Rolley, at age 29, the nation’s youngest big city planning director.

Now running for mayor at the tender age of 36, Rolley has thrown himself with vigor into his political campaign. He rises each morning at 5:30 and, from 9 on, calls everyone he can think of and asks for money. On breaks from fundraising, he visits neighborhood associations—there are more than 900 by his count, hundreds more than there would be in the orderly, efficient city he envisions Baltimore could be—and delivers a rousing stump speech. He tells people he’ll lower their taxes and clean out City Hall’s petrified wood, streamline the property acquisition process for savvy developers, and implement the city’s Master Plan—the one he quarterbacked four years ago, which has since languished—so that economic and neighborhood and social development are approached logically and strategically, rather than in the politically driven, piecemeal way it’s been done for the past 30 years. “We can create investment opportunities that make sense in a way we haven’t in a very long time,” Rolley told a passel of tech types in a Canton meeting in late January.

If O’Malley is a gladhander in technocrat’s clothes, Rolley, like Rhodes Scholar Kurt Schmoke before him, like President Obama, is a genuine technocrat whose steady gaze and firm handshake are well-rehearsed skills mustered in service of empirical, quantitative facts.

And those facts, Rolley says, are all in Baltimore’s favor: With just a smidge of better management, a dollop of long-term planning, and a dose of gimlet-eyed truth-telling, Baltimore could be a “world class city.”

Rolley’s can-do optimism reads at first like political calculation (no one votes for a sourpuss), but he comes by it honestly, through a crucible of tough circumstances, rigorous education, religious faith, and, finally, entrée into the elite corps of the best and brightest who have dominated U.S. policy and politics since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

“I’m running right now, even though people have told me to wait because it’s not my turn, because I feel that Baltimore is at a tipping point,” Rolley tells his Canton audience. He uses that “not my turn” line often. It imbues his campaign with underdog status, messianic urgency, and righteous credibility, ringing with the tone of a 1960s civil rights march.

But who, in Rolley’s case, are those naysayers?

“Many people. People who are influential in the city,” Rolley says between bites of a vegetarian omelet during a recent two-hour breakfast interview. “These are people who you would read about in the Sun. And some you don’t. They tell me there’s a path you’re supposed to follow, from City Council, City Council president. . . .”

What are their names?, he is asked again.

“Rick O. Berndt,” Rolley says, describing a meeting with the politically wired local lawyer, corporate board member, and archdiocese advisor. “He helped to bring me into the O’Malley administration. I respect him. He didn’t think this [run] would be a good move.”

Berndt doesn’t recall it that way.

“I been listening to Otis, over and over, tell people that people said it wasn’t his turn,” Berndt says. “I just wondered who would say that. I really didn’t tell him it wasn’t his turn. I don’t even believe in that phrase, ‘it’s your turn’ to run.”

What Berndt did tell Rolley, he says, is that Rolley can’t win—because he has never run for public office and so lacks a definable constituency of voters. This is basically what others have also told Rolley, and said about his mayoral prospects.

“It’s what I heard,” Rolley says during a March 8 lunch meeting regarding the discrepancy between his account and Berndt’s.

Rolley does not always hear just what he wants to. One recent Sunday afternoon after returning from church, he was getting himself some soup when his wife, Charline, fell down the stairs with the couple’s 6-month-old daughter, Grace, in her arms. The baby screamed in a way the parents had never heard before.

They went to the emergency room and had Grace checked for a head injury. She scanned fine and the couple (Charline was fine, Rolley says) was about to be discharged when they paused to change Grace’s diaper. That’s when she started screaming again, because her leg was broken. Fiddling with his smart phone at the March 8 meeting, he turns it to display a photograph of Grace with a full-length cast on her tiny right leg.

“I’ve been through some things in my life,” Rolley says, “but stretching out my baby’s leg for the x-ray and then when they put on the temporary splint . . .” he trails off. “Auugh,” he says. “’Cause your gut. . . You’re always trying to protect.”

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