John Delaney Is Already Running for President.

'You probably don’t know his name. But Iowans have been hearing it for more than a year.

DES MOINES — Partway through his stump speech at the Iowa State Fair in August, Representative John Delaney spotted a familiar face walking by.

“Mr. Speaker!” he called from his perch atop The Des Moines Register’s soapbox. “What a nice surprise. Speaker Boehner is in the house. You’re looking good, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate you coming out and supporting me, I really do.”

John Boehner, the former House speaker, wearing a blue-and-white gingham shirt almost identical to Mr. Delaney’s — and looking distinctly as though he wished he had taken a different route from the pork chop stand to the parking lot — was instantly surrounded by reporters.

“I worked on a lot of stuff with him. He’s a good member,” was about all Mr. Boehner, a Republican, would say of Mr. Delaney, a Maryland Democrat running for president. “Oh God. I’m just walking by. If it weren’t Delaney there — I’m walking by, I got a pork chop, I was walking by, I saw Delaney. I said, ‘Aw, I’ll stop.’ I should have known better. I should have kept walking.” . .

He is well aware that better-known Democratic politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are attracting more news coverage even though they have not yet officially declared, and he knows that even though he is the only major candidate running right now, he is running from behind.

So why do it? “I think I’m the right person for the job, but not enough people knew who I was or still know who I am,” Mr. Delaney, 55, said. “The way to solve that problem, it seems to me, is to get in early and just work harder than everyone else.” . .

And two days later, he would hit the last of Iowa’s 99 counties, completing a classic campaign feat before any better-known opponent started. He isn’t running for re-election to the House, the better to go “all in” on running for president.

It’s hard to overstate how unusual Mr. Delaney’s timeline is. He announced his candidacy on July 28, 2017, almost three years before the Democratic convention. . .

And yet, by some measures, Mr. Delaney’s strategy has been effective. In an Emerson College poll in September, only 21 percent of Iowa voters were unfamiliar with him. . .

Mr. Delaney’s central message is simple: Globalization has been an “extraordinarily positive” force, he says, but not for everyone, and politicians should have acted — through tax incentives, infrastructure investments, better public education, universal health care — to make it positive for more people. Instead, they were “too busy fighting.”

In an interview on his campaign bus, winding through corn and soybean fields west of Des Moines, he said he would start to change that by dedicating the first 100 days of his administration exclusively to existing bipartisan legislation. . .

“So much of politics these days has become, quote, ‘about politics,’” Mr. Delaney said in an earlier interview, adding that he wanted to emphasize civility, bipartisanship and compromise. “People getting into these pointless arguments about ideology, and are you left or center or progressive, or all this garbage.”

A self-described “pragmatic idealist,” Mr. Delaney was a businessman before he was elected to the House in 2012: the founder of two financial companies and, at one point, the youngest chief executive on the New York Stock Exchange. Those companies made him one of the wealthiest members of Congress.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/us/politics/john-delaney-2020-iowa.html