It’s always nice when the New York Times looks beyond its prime readership and takes notice of the rest of the country. And that’s why I applaud Timothy Egan’s Week in Review piece today on successful Democratic governors west of the Mississippi. Those of you who read Democratic blogs probably know all about Montana’s Brian Schweitzer, and Egan gives him his due. But he also focuses on Wyoming’s Dave Freudenthal, Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, and New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, and more generally makes the point that 12 of the 22 current Democratic governors have been elected in states carried by George W. Bush in 2004. The success of Democratic governors in “red states” is one of the most under-reported political stories of our decade. And the ranks of those red-state Donkeys may well increase significantly next year. So read Egan, but also get ready to make a New Year’s Resolution to pay more attention to gubernatorial politics in 2006, and join the debate as to why Democrats are able to win in states where our presidential candidates are losing. This is one subject on which the DLC–which is close to many of these red-state governors–and anti-Washington-Establishment Democrats, should be able to see things the same 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.
