ICYMI: Financial Times Column Praises Delaney’s Approach, Knowledge, and Ideas

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, March 22, 2019
CONTACT: Carrie Healey, 301-500-8642, carrie@johnkdelaney.com, press@johnkdelaney.com

FRIENDSHIP HEIGHTS, MD – Today, in a column in the Financial Times titled, “In praise of John Delaney — a politician with ideas”, Ed Luce writes, “Delaney has two qualities that I find refreshing. First, he’s supremely knowledgeable. He’s fluent in economics, how to start a company, foreign policy, healthcare (where he made his fortune) and the workings of Washington. Second, most of his ideas are good. For example, he’d adopt a carbon tax and distribute the proceeds on a progressive basis to working Americans. He’d provide basic government healthcare to all without forcing Americans to give up their existing private healthcare plans. And he’d double the earned income tax, which is America’s most effective anti-poverty programme in the last 30 years.”

This comes after Jennifer Rubin praised Delaney in a Washington Post column titled, “The smartest presidential candidate you’ve never heard of.”

The full column can be found below:

Financial Times
In praise of John Delaney — a politician with ideas
By Ed Luce
3/22/19

Many of you will not have heard of John Delaney. He was a three term Democratic lawmaker from Maryland who quit Congress in 2018 to run for the presidency. He was the first to declare more than a year before that and has been running ever since. With one or two exceptions, including a nice piece by my colleague Demetri Sevastopulo, and columns by George Will and David Brooks, Delaney has received scant media attention. Partly that’s because he was a “workhorse” not a “showhorse” when he was in Congress. While others were jostling to get on TV, Delaney was quietly crafting some of the smartest legislation. His infrastructure 2.0 bill would have funded a badly needed upgrade to US roads, bridges, airports, etc with the proceeds of repatriated corporate tax revenues. Uniquely, Delaney convinced the head of the Republican Freedom Caucus (the Tea Party), and the leader of the Democratic Progressive Caucus (the ultraliberals) to endorse the bill. It was nevertheless killed. Two years later, its language was incorporated into Donald Trump’s tax cut — minus the infrastructure funding. It was a sour conclusion to one of the most intelligent recent efforts to locate that increasingly microscopic sweet spot where anti and pro-government parties might agree.

It’d be easy to mock any Democrat running on a platform of being a bipartisan president. The US has a long history of “mugwumps” — people who subscribe to the (Aussie soap star) Jason Donovan doctrine of “why can’t we all just get along?” Others call them “goo goo” delusionists, which is short for good government. If failure to get along were the problem, rather than ideology, that might be a good fix. But the root cause of US polarisation is ideological — and, worse, to some extent biological. How is it possible to split the difference between parties that are increasingly moving towards opposite poles? The day of the Rockefeller Republican is over. The blue dog Democrat isn’t far behind. That said, Delaney’s logic is hard to refute. However well Democrats do in 2020, they’re highly unlikely to get more than 60 seats in the US Senate. That means that Republicans can do precisely what they did to Barack Obama, which was block everything he proposed. America can’t afford another decade of Washington inaction.

Delaney has two qualities that I find refreshing. First, he’s supremely knowledgeable. He’s fluent in economics, how to start a company, foreign policy, healthcare (where he made his fortune) and the workings of Washington. With the exception of Elizabeth Warren, I doubt any other contender could hold a candle to Delaney’s grasp of the issues. Second, most of his ideas are good. For example, he’d adopt a carbon tax and distribute the proceeds on a progressive basis to working Americans. He’d provide basic government healthcare to all without forcing Americans to give up their existing private healthcare plans. And he’d double the earned income tax, which is America’s most effective anti-poverty programme in the last 30 years. These aren’t incremental ideas. But they come across as such in the 2020 cycle. My own bias would be towards more radical ideas; I believe you should pitch big and compromise later. But Delaney has experience of trying to pass serious legislation, which is more than can be said of Bernie Sanders. That said, his chances are very slim. I hope at least that he can make it onto the Democratic debating podium for which he’ll need 65,000 individual small campaign donors. It’d be great to have a genuine policy expert on the stage. Rana, am I being too mean to the others?

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