The plan was to write these “life experience” diaries at a rate of one per week as candidates announced. However, candidates have been announcing quickly and so we’ve had to increase the rate in order to catch up. Rep. John K. Delaney announced his campaign last year, and so, should have gone first, but I only heard about his (so far) low profile campaign earlier this week, after Kamala Harris announced.
If you are new to this series, these diaries are examining Democratic candidates for U.S. president not in terms of fundraising, “electability” or other horse race questions, nor in terms of detailed platform proposals. I am very interested in both topics, but I leave them for others (and the primaries, debates, etc.) to inform us. This series, rather, focuses on the candidates’ background, looking for breadth of life experience in terms of both being able to connect to voters’ concerns and in terms of how such life experience might inform the candidate’s approach to actual governance, if elected.
You can follow these links to previous diaries profiling Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Jay Inslee. Later today (Saturday), in an effort to continue to catch up to campaign announcements, I will publish a profile of Andrew Yang. Tomorrow (Sunday), I will profile Mayor Pete Butigrieg (D-South Bend, IN), who, at 37, ties Tulsi Gabbard as youngest candidate in the race.
Early Life and Personal Background:
John Kevin Delaney was born 16 April 1963 in Wood Ridge, New Jersey to a blue-collar, union, family. His grandparents were immigrants from England and Ireland and their hard work is often cited as a large influence. His father, Jack Delaney, was an electrician who was a 60 year member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). His mother, Elaine (Rowe) Delaney, was a stay-at-home wife and mother, a pattern only possible because, in those days, a union job in a construction trade such as electrician earned a salary which could support a family without need of a second income. Delaney has one sister, Diane, but I’ve been unable to find information as to whether she is older or younger, or any other information.
Delaney worked on construction sites in various capacities all through high school. Mason, painter, electrician’s assistant, and landscaper, were some of the blue collar jobs that Delaney held all during his youth.
He comes from a Catholic family and has continued to be an active Catholic layperson. If elected, he would be our first Catholic POTUS since John F. Kennedy. Article 6 of the Constitution prevents any official religious test for public office, but nothing prevents voters from applying personal tests in the voting booth. He was active in the Boy Scouts, but if he made Eagle Scout, there is no mention of it.
His biography also mentions that, as a NJ native, he was and remains a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, and boasts of having seen “The Boss” in concert over 30 times. (Points for good taste.)
This is the kind of background that can speak to blue collar workers and which, one would hope, would remember their kitchen table concerns in office.
Education:
Like most Catholic families who can afford it, John went to parochial schools, graduating from Bergen Catholic High School, an all-male Catholic high school under the supervision of the Archdiocese of Newark and with an educational philosophy affiliated with the Congregation of Christian Brothers (CFC). He graduated in 1981. I found nothing about his experience there, but he did well enough to be admitted to Columbia University. I sometimes wonder about the commitment to good public primary and secondary schools by politicians that went to private schools, but there is nothing in his voting record that suggests that in Delaney’s case, my suspicion is well founded. Further, it should be noted that U. S. Catholics developed the parochial school system because of bias against Catholics in most of U. S. history, including the practice, well into the 20th C., of Protestant prayers and reading from the Protestant canon of the Holy Bible in public schools—despite the 1st Amendment’s “no establishment” clause separating Church and State. This has motivated generations of working class Catholic families to sacrifice other expenses to send their children to parochial schools.
Delaney earned a B.S. degree in biology from Columbia University in the City of New York in 1985. Columbia is one of the most prestigious universities in the country, a member of the vaunted Ivy League. It’s core curriculum, required of all undergraduates, is broad education in the liberal arts, using largely primary sources and based around The Great Books of the Western World. That forces students to read primary sources in a wide range of disciplines, fostering intellectual curiosity, the ability to comprehend difficult texts on a wide variety of topics, and to debate “big ideas” and perspectives throughout history. The result is often a very wide ranging intellect, as it was with President Obama.
Columbia is also one of the world’s most expensive universities, and Delaney was enabled to attend, in part, due to scholarships from his father’s union (IBEW Local 164), as well as scholarships from the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and the Lion’s Club. His biography on his campaign website recognizes that he would not have had the educational opportunities he has enjoyed without such scholarships and he has attempted to “pay it forward” by contributing to endowments himself. I would think that such a background would lead a candidate to be very concerned about the spiraling costs of higher education (while scholarships remain frozen at amounts set decades ago) and of student debt.
When he enrolled at Columbia, Delaney had thought to become a medical doctor, but that prospect lost its appeal prior to graduation. So, on advice from friends, he applied to law schools, instead. He earned his J.D. (law degree) at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. in 1988. This is a prestigious law school, but it does deviate from the Ivy League (especially the law schools of Harvard and Yale) pipeline of many political careers. (This deviation is becoming a trend in these profiles, which is a pleasant surprise and a contrast to the last several election cycles.) At Georgetown, Delaney met his future wife, April, who was from Idaho, and he rearranged his entire class schedule to take classes with her. (More on Delaney’s wife and daughters below.) The pair have remained active Georgetown Law alumni, both serving terms on the Board of Directors, and working to endow Georgetown Law’s Hillary Clinton Fellowship and the Delaney-Post-Graduate Residency Program. In 2015, Washington College (Chestertown, MD) awarded Delaney an honorary doctor of laws degree.
Business Career:
Instead of a legal career, Delaney started two companies from scratch, both of which are today traded on the NYSE. At the time he resigned Congress in 2017, he was the only former CEO of a publicly traded company serving in the House of Representatives. In 1993, Delaney founded Health Care Financial Partners (HCFP) to make loans available to smaller scale healthcare providers largely ignored by the larger banks and financial institutions. HCFP went public in 1996 and was acquired by Heller Financial in 1999.
In 2000, Delaney co-founded CapitalSource, a commercial lender headquartered in Chevy Chase, MD which provided capital to small and mid-size companies. The U. S. Treasury awarded CapitalSource a Banking Enterprise Award in 2010. The award was given in honor of CapitalSource’s investment in low-income and financially distressed communities. It also won awards for its corporate culture as a great place to work and for great company benefits.
Delaney has been a very successful financier and businessperson, but of a very different stripe from Trump. Though doubtless making a small fortune, his focus was on using capital to help others. He can rightfully cite his experience as a job creator—of good paying, high benefit jobs, at that.
House of Representatives
After two decades in business, Delaney decided to run for the redistricted form of MD’s 6th Congressional district. Although GOP victories in 2010 led to gerrymandered districts in GOP favor for much of the nation, MD went the other way. Delaney served 3 terms in the U.S. House,from 2013 until his resignation in 2017.
He served on the Financial Services Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. Delaney was part of the New Democrat Coalition, the Climate Solutions Caucus, and created the Artificial Intelligence Caucus.
He introduced legislation to end partisan gerrymandering and make Election Day a national holiday.
Most would characterize Delaney’s time in Congress as well within the center-left mainstream of Democratic politics. He drew criticism from his own Catholic diocese for supporting the Affordable Care Act’s provision requiring health insurance companies to cover artificial birth control. The Human Rights Campaign gives his voting record 100% on legislation pertaining to LGBTQ concerns. He has proposed raising the corporate tax rate to pay for infrastructure investments.
Family:
Delaney is married to April McCain Delaney, whom he met, as mentioned above, when both were students at Georgetown Law. April is the daughter of potato farmers from Idaho. She has become a philanthropist and worked in non-profit sectors, most recently as Washington Director for Common Sense Media (educating families on social media) and she has chaired the “Meeting Women from 50 States” program of the National Prayer Breakfast.
The couple have four (4) daughters, ages 24, 20, 17, and 10. The eldest, Summer, is a recent alumna of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Next eldest daughter, Brooke, is a theatre major at Northwestern’s School of Communication. The younger two daughters are Lily, and Grace.
Conclusion, sort of: I, personally, don’t see any path to the nomination for Delaney in a crowded Democratic field with many superstars. However, I hope Delaney continues in public service, perhaps as a future governor of MD (although I hope Ben Jealous runs again) when the state recovers from its obsession with supposedly “moderate” GOP governors or as a U. S. Senator, considering that Ben Cardin is 75. Further, I’m glad that our nation is still producing the kind of person who comes from blue collar roots, makes good while doing good for others, and is motivated to give back to the wider community. It’s very easy to be cynical in these times, especially about Christian, straight, white, cis-males (and I say that as one of them). Delaney’s background and candidacy is a cure for that kind of cynicism, even if he is very much a dark horse candidate.