by EDM Staff
Apropos of the post below, Dems need to insure that as many Katrina evacuees as possible are registered to vote in time for the November elections. No doubt some evacuees are reluctant to register in new states where they now live for a number of reasons, such as uncertainty about their residence in the near future. But there are a significant number of votes at stake here. For example, FEMA estimates that there are 34,575 evacuee households now residing in Georgia — and growing quite rapidly. It’s not hard to envision 50,000 or so potentially eligible voters associated with these households, a significant number for any state. Nor is it too much of a stretch assume that many, if not most of them are angry about the Administration’s weak leadership on their behalf.
No doubt there will be GOP shenanigans aplenty in the months ahead to prevent these potential voters from getting registered, and the states have a range of different residency and registration requirements (see this link for a state by state comparison). Hopefully, Democratic party leaders in affected southern states are already planning strategies to get as many of these potential voters as possible registered. Not a few important races, including the governorship of Georgia, could depend 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.
