For those of you who share my interest in the fate of one Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor in my home state of Georgia, you might want to check out a piece I did for the Washington Monthly, just out today.The bottom line is that Ralph finally appears to be in deep trouble, not just because of his continuing embroilment in the Abramoff scandal, but because, well, a lot of Georgia Republicans just don’t like the guy, and haven’t for years. Some of it has to do with the disastrous campaign he helped run for another candidate for Lieutenant Governor back in 1998, which helped drag down the entire GOP ticket. And some of it has to do with his behavior as Georgia state party chair in 2002, when he took a little too much credit for a big year, and disrespected gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue a little too much for his own good. My own conclusion is that Ralph is probably going down, if not in the August primary, then in November, even if he doesn’t get a lethal visit from the process servers in the meantime. We’ll know soon enough, but this is clearly a guy who is having to live with the consequences of his past misdeeds, ethical and political.
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.
