Democracy Corps new report, “The Democrats’ Moment to Engage,” brings more dismal news for the GOP — and reason for Democrats to be cautiously optimistic. The Report, which includes results of a survey conducted 6/20-26, indicates that 56 percent of Americans think the country is “on the wrong track,” the same percentage agreeing that the war in Iraq is “not worth it” and 55 percent of respondents want the country to go in “a different direction” than Bush’s leadership is taking it. These percentages have been holding steady for Democracy Corps’ last three surveys, and report authors Stan Greenberg and James Carville conclude “This is a country almost settled on the need for change.”
The report also found that Democrats lead by 5 percent in a “hypothetical congressional contest” during the last three surveys. But the authors warn against overconfidence, because the GOP free fall is accompanied by “no rise in positive sentiment about the Democrats” and Democrats’ positive ratings still lag 5 percent behind the Republicans.
Carville and Greenberg urge Dems to make “sharp choices to diferentiate” themselves from the Republicans. Democrats must become “the party of change” and “empower the middle class over the big corporate interests in Washington.”
This and a host of other recent surveys (see below) strongly indicate that Americans want a clear change of direction. Job one for Dems is to show they can lead the way.
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.
