My colleague The Moose and I were talking this morning about an attack on Tom DeLay that was published by The Battalion, the Texas A&M student newspaper, which the Texas blogger Greg Wythe brought to our attention. I was curious about a reference Greg made to DeLay having once referred to A&M as a “den of iniquity,” and The Moose (a native of Waco) enlightened me with a great link: a 2002 article in the Baptist Standard, the official voice of the Texas Baptist Convention. Turns out DeLay told an audience of Texas Baptists that they shouldn’t send their kids to A&M or Baylor because these famously conservative schools weren’t really conservative any more, and were tolerating all sorts of immoral behavior. (Read the whole rich story, which also reveals that DeLay was booted out of Baylor for a “prank” he committed at–you guessed it–Texas A&M). I don’t know that much about Texas, but I do know two things: (1) there’s no percentage in taking a stance to the right of Southern Baptists on issues of personal morality; and (2) you don’t want to mess with the Aggies. DeLay papered over the furor from his disrespecting of Baylor and Texas A&M, but you never know how much ill-will got stored away for future reference. It’s like the old saying: Be careful who you step on as you climb the ladder, ’cause it can earn you a long, lonely fall from the top.
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.
