Many of you are probably familiar with the work of Amy Sullivan (who half-jokingly calls herself Bible Girl in reflection of her tireless devotion to the cause of making it clear the Cultural Right has no monopoly on Christianity), who gave up her blog, Political Aims, a while back to work as an editor at Washington Monthly. I’m happy to report that the fine folks over at Beliefnet have signed up Amy for a brief stint of blogging on religion and politics. You can tell she’s missed the blogosphere, because she’s knocking out several posts a day, and it’s good to see she hasn’t lost her distinctive tone of exasperated reasonableness. These are exasperating times for reasonable people. Be sure to check out Amy’s posts on the John Hostettler outrage on the House floor, the heavy-handed GOP effort to Foxify public radio and television, and Tom Monaghan’s rather creepy campaign to build a conservative Catholic gated utopia in Central Florida. I expect to weigh in on at least a couple of these subjects myself in a bit.NOTE: I know this is getting old, but I’m continuing to experience serious Wi-Fi problems, which have interfered with my ususal nocturnal blogging habits, but the techies are working on it.
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.
