Rep. John Delaney — Who? — Running For President In 2020
We’re roughly two and a half years away from the start of the 2020 Presidential campaign, but we’ve already got our first candidate:
Maryland Rep. John Delaney on Friday became the first Democrat to announce he would run for president in 2020.
The 54-year-old three-term congressman revealed his plans in a Washington Post op-ed. He won’t run for re-election and is bypassing a run for Maryland governor in 2018.
He enters the race an extreme longshot — with no national profile among Democrats and a moderate record that appears out of sync with the party’s progressive primary electorate.
He enters the race an extreme longshot — with no national profile among Democrats and a moderate record that appears out of sync with the party’s progressive primary electorate.
Delaney is a self-made businessman who has launched two companies and could pour millions of dollars of his own money into the campaign.
In Congress, his positions that put him at odds with many Democratic primary voters, include his opposition to a $15 minimum wage and his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He has proposed allowing businesses to repatriate money earned overseas without paying taxes in exchange for buying infrastructure bonds.
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“Our government is hamstrung by excessive partisanship. We are letting critical opportunities to improve the country pass us by. And we are not even talking about the most important thing: the future,” Delaney wrote Friday.
“The victims of this leadership failure are the good people we are sworn to serve, and we are leaving our country ill-prepared for dramatic changes ahead. The current administration is making us less prosperous and less secure. I’m running because I have an original approach to governing and economic policy that can put us on a different course.”
As noted, Delany is pretty much an unknown and his policy positions put him at odds with where the Democratic base seems to be moving. I wouldn’t bet on him actually being in the race when voting starts in February 2020.
When I read the headline, for a moment I thought Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten had announced a run for president.
He would probably get more votes than whoever this guy is.
I don’t know anything about this guy, but I think that today’s world of instant communication makes being an “unknown” a very surmountable problem. Of course, I did think that the thirty years of being in the public eye made Trump unelectable; nobody would vote for a tabloid TV personality.
@Slugger: Being in the public eye for thirty years, like many things, falls under IOKIYAR. There was no Democratic character assassination/investigation machine working on Trump like the GOP machine that was working on Hillary. Obama kind of caught the GOPs flat footed. This guy could do the same.
@Stormy Dragon: Not from me he wouldn’t. Although Jim Delany isn’t actually an idiot, he is a greedy bastard.
EDIT: That said, put any name at all on the ballot against Trump, and I’ll vote for the random name.
WaPo needs to stop using these words. They don’t know what they mean, and neither do their readers.