Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has an interesting post today in his ongoing debate with Frank Foer over the viability of a Wesley Clark candidacy. He argues that Clark cannot get the nomination because: (a) unlike Dean, he needs the party establishment to fall into line behind his candidacy, but they’re unlikely to do so because of all their other commitments to candidates still in the race; and (b) unlike Dean, he has no strategy designed to generate liberal support which is so central to the Democratic party nominating process. So he can’t replace Dean as the liberal candidate, but he’s poorly positioned to be the anti-Dean
And maybe that’s not so bad, says Scheiber, since who knows how good a campaigner he’d be anyway. More important, it’s Dean, not Clark (or any of the other candidates), who seems to have a handle on the real challenge of the Democratic primary process: generating liberal enthusiasm and support in the primaries to get the nomination, but doing it in such a way (through tone, rhetoric, etc.) that it’s possible to tack toward moderate positions later to win the general. (Note to Dean campaign: this appears to be some sort of Dean endorsement, though perhaps not exactly the kind you were looking for).
For more on Clark, see the excellent profile of him by Josh Green in the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Better than anything else DR has read, it gives one a sense of how Clark might come off in a campaign–both good and bad.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
