Presidential Campaigning For 2020 Has Begun

With the 2020 Iowa Caucuses only 17 months away, the presidential campaign season in Mills County officially kicked off last Wednesday with an appearance by Democratic congressman John Delaney of Maryland.

Delaney, who is in his third term of representing Maryland’s sixth congressional district in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., spoke to a gathering of about 20 people in the Glenwood First Congregational United Church of Christ fellowship hall.

He describes himself as “a different kind of Democrat” who has earned high marks for bipartisanship and his ability to work across the aisle with members of the Republican Party. Delaney said one of his top priorities as president would be to heal a divided nation.

“How do we take a severely divided nation and bring it back together?” he asked. “It would help to have a president who actually wants to work with Congress and get things done.”

Delaney said dissatisfaction with the Donald Trump administration among Democrats, Independents and a growing number of Republicans has created an opportunity for his party to reclaim the White House in 2020.

“We can step forward and be the party America desperately needs and wants,” he said. “This is what our country expects of us.”

Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves for losing the White House in 2016, Delaney said.

“In hindsight, we nominated the only person (Hillary Clinton) who could lose to Donald Trump,” he said. “We made a big mistake last time because we really did have a primary. We left a lot of people behind in this country.”

Delaney said Democrats should follow the lead of Republicans who have focused on winning local aces in recent elections, including governorships and state legislative seats.

“They figured out if you control the states, you control Congress. They figured it out sooner than we did,” he said.
The Democratic National Committee should set the tone for change by moving its headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to the middle of the country, Delaney added.

Delaney said some of his priorities as president would be education, tax policy and healthcare. He said “the most basic right of every American is education” but too much of the current focus centers on four-year colleges and more emphasis should be made on providing trade school education and training for skilled workers.

He supports universal healthcare, but is opposed to a “one-payer” system.

Present tax laws, Delaney said, keeps “wealth and opportunity highly concentrated.”

Delaney, the grandson of an Irish immigrant and son of a union electrician, was the co-founder of two companies – Health Care Financial Partners, which makes loans to small health service providers, and CapitalSource, a commercial lender for small and mid-size businesses. He left the companies to pursue his political ambitions.