Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney was on The View Thursday, joining the crowd of Democrat presidential candidates who have come on the show. Despite espousing many typical liberal, big government policies, he framed himself as a centrist Democrat, noting areas where his party was being extreme, fiscally. While Sunny Hostin pressed the Democrat from the left at every turn, even Joy Behar admitted she wasn’t for one of the party’s more radical bills.
Behar brought up Delaney being booed at the California Democrat Convention in early June for opposing his colleague’s proposed “Medicare for All” bill. He argued that he was for universal health care as a human “right” but didn’t believe in taking away the option of private insurance.
Even Behar had to admit government-run health care didn’t give the best care.
BEHAR: No one likes that. I don't like it. I have Medicare because I'm old.
DELANEY: It's great, Medicare.
BEHAR: It's great but I also have to supplement it with my insurance from my job. It doesn't pay for everything. So really people need both.
Co-host Sunny Hostin jumped in to argue that people shouldn’t have options because it reduces the government’s strength (as if this were a bad thing):
“Where is the incentive? If you have these private insurance companies and you have the government, the government then doesn't have the negotiating strength!” she gushed.
That wasn’t the only time Hostin tried to bring Delaney further to the left.
Later on, co-host Ana Navarro confronted their guest about calling some socialist policies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, “intellectually dishonest:”
So you are a capitalist, a successful one, an unapologetic one, and you say some of these socialist policies being proposed are intellectual dishonest... Are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren being intellectually dishonest? Are they lying with some of the things they are proposing?
Delaney said they were, pointing out taking away health care from 150 million Americans was not a good option, plus hospitals could not afford to pay staff if every patient was being covered by Medicare. But Hostin again touted Warren’s radical policies:
HOSTIN: But she [Warren] has a great plan for the student debt.
DELANEY: Well, I think it's hard to just write off the student debt. I mean, why don't we write offer the national debt at some point, right? We definitely should make student loans way more affordable--
HOSTIN: She's talking about taxing the uber wealthy.
BEHAR: Two cents on the dollar over $500 million a year
HOSTIN: And we would eradicate that. That sounds pretty good to me.
In a lightning round afterwards, Hostin claimed “reparations” and the Green New Deal were some of the “most important issues to voters in 2020.”
None of the hosts pushed back on Delaney’s more extreme positions such as repealing the Hyde Amendment.
