Andy Card’s resignation today does not, as my colleague The Moose has noted, mean much of anything in terms of the direction, or lack thereof, of the White House or the Bush administration. The official explanation will likely be that Card is simply tired after five years as chief of staff. This raises a question that I thought about while staring at a recent Washington Post article that essentially blamed some of the blunders being committed by the administration on systemic fatigue among key White House staffers. Fatigue from what, exactly? I mean, it’s not like this administration has been terribly active in terms of meeting the big domestic or national security challenges facing the country, right? It has horribly mismanaged the war in Iraq; is frightenenly sloppy in terms of securing the country against terrorism; botched Katrina; refuses to do anything about the burgeoning fiscal crisis; and can’t find its collective butt with both hands on much any other issue. Moreover, as we know from a variety of sources, most notably the famous DiIlulio disclosures, this is a White House whose burdens do not include any particular interest in policy development. I guess we have to assume that bad government is, to use the president’s own favorite phrase, “hard work.” And 24-7 spinning of bad government is really hard work.
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.
