A Worse Democratic Candidate For President Than Biden? Let Me See-- Well, He's Not A Really Candidate, But There Is John Delaney

When I was on the air with David Feldman this week, he asked me if there are any candidates worse than Biden. I mentioned that there are a few on the right-fringe of the Democratic Party who have no traction and no chance to win but that certainly John Delaney would be almost as bad. Delaney, a slime ball multimillionaire, was one of the most virulently anti-progressive members of Congress, who sold his seat to an even richer dork, David Trone, the only member of Congress to have endorsed Delaney's hopeless presidential campaign. I don't even think I bothered doing a Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President piece on him because his bid is so pathetic and so under the radar. I did mention over a year ago, though, that he is functioning as someone making Biden look less reactionary by comparison.

In Congress, Delaney, a New Dem and devoted Wall Street ally, served their interests as a member of the House Financial Services Committee. He was always an outspoke anti-Bernie partisan and as soon as he bought himself a House seat he immediately became a fount of Republican ideas-- like forbidding the EPA from protecting clean drinking water in streams and lakes, raising the retirement age for the working poor and forcing chained CPI down the throats of Social Security recipients. Delaney has been the perfect Democrat for Fox News, always eager to blame progressives for everything, always eager to equate progressives with the extremists, Confederates and fascists that dominate the Republican Party. He's an advocate of the "both sides are equally wrong" simplemindedness. "Washington," he wrote in a Washington Post OpEd in 2015, "is paralyzed by extreme political rhetoric that creates powerful sound bites but poor policy... With Washington already broken, the last thing we need is a left-wing version of the tea party. But I am worried about where some of the loudest voices in the room could take the Democratic Party." Delaney is worried. Why doesn't he hop the fence and join the GOP officially? He continued, in a barely veiled critique of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, Sherrod Brown and other progressive stalwarts that "some in our party continue to engage in time-consuming rhetoric attacking banks that has little chance of producing more financial reform and distracts from far more consequential areas of economic risk, such as climate change Climate Change..."

Oh, so he's interested in the climate crisis now? The anti-environmental fracking guy is concerned about climate Who knew? Is he talking about it in his fantasy campaign for president? Yes! Just yesterday he denounced the Green New Deal! Politico, desperate for "news" on a slow day, even covered it. On a hate-talk radio show hosted by Hugh Hewitt-- and sounding like he is auditioning for Fox News-- he denounced progressive policies, singling out the Green New Deal and Medicare-For-All. Hewitt goaded him by asking how he "planned to stand apart from those on the Democratic field's left flank on a debate stage."

"I'm just going to point out: Their policies are bad policies. Medicare for All-- in terms of the bill that’s been introduced in the Senate-- is fundamentally bad health care policy. Putting aside we have no way of paying for it, even if we were able to pay for it, it still would be bad policy... There’s a much better way to deal with climate change than the Green New Deal, which will in many ways crush working families... So I’m going to take them on hard on their policies, which I think are fundamentally flawed and are not going to move this country forward in the right direction and are going to hurt a lot of people. [If Democrats take on Trump with] "bad policy, we're not gonna win... The Democratic Party needs someone like myself who can actually go toe to toe with the president on the economy and where voters will believe with a Delaney administration that the economy’s not going to go off the rails by embracing some half-baked socialist policies."

Sounds like if he doesn't get the job at Fox, maybe a President Biden (God forbid) will give him a minor job for helping slander Biden's opponents in the primary.

By the way, Delaney wasn't the only right-of-center Democrat Politico showcased yesterday. Sarah Ferris highlighted the Velvet Hammer, Stephanie Murphy, head Blue Dog. I don't want to call anyone (other than Trump and everyone who enables him) a worthless piece of shit, but... Murphy is pretty worthless. She exists in Congress-- just as Delaney did-- to prevent the Democratic Party doing anything to help working families. As head of the Blue Dogs she can get them all 27 of then barking at the same time and get a little attention for the far right of the Democratic Party and their Republican perspective on issues. But that's it. She's never accomplished anything that helps her constituents-- and never will-- and is likely to lose her Orlando-area seat in 2022.

In a closed-door meeting about immigration policy recently, Pelosi chastised her for helping the GOP exploit fissures in the Democratic Party. She brags that she was able to stop a $15 minimum wage bill from going forward. I wonder if voters in her district know that; I hope so.

“She’s a low-key negotiator and power broker but don't mistake that for not having a lot of power,” said Rep. Ben McAdams, a Blue Dog Democrat from Utah. “As long as we’re organized and willing to say no to legislation that doesn’t advance good policy, legislation doesn't go forward without us being willing to support it.”

...McAdams, who won one of the closest contests last November, said he privately approached Murphy even before the Democratic whip team with his qualms about the caucus’s marquee campaign finance and anti-corruption bill, H.R. 1.

McAdams, like roughly a dozen other moderates DINOs, had issues with the idea of public financed campaigns, with taxpayer money going toward TV ads.

Within days, Murphy worked with the bill’s chief authors, Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and John Sarbanes (D-MD), to come up with a workaround so that all the money came from fees, not tax dollars. The tweak went almost unnoticed until a reporter noticed that a group of Blue Dogs had all become co-sponsors on the same day.

Back in the fall, Murphy withheld her vote for Pelosi as speaker until she and a band of moderates DINOs-- including some Republicans-- secured a promise from leadership to make it easier for bipartisan legislation to receive floor votes.

...And unlike many of her Democratic colleagues, Murphy has been happy to accept invitations to the White House. It has paid off: On one visit, she pitched Vice President Mike Pence to support loosening restrictions for federal funding on gun research, and she says that moment-- which came in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting in her home state-- helped get the provision ultimately signed into law.

Murphy has largely avoided direct clashes with the progressive firebrands who have dominated discussion of the new Congress, but she recently made something of an exception by publishing an op-ed condemning socialism that some on Capitol Hill saw as a rebuke to members of her own party.

I would pay real money to see Delaney and Murphy perform that lovely Garfunkel and Oates song up top together. And certainly either one of them would fit in perfectly in a modern day version of this scene from The History of The World in the Roman Senate: