The big non-congressional political story of the last week here in the Emerald City was Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan’s announcement that he was dropping out of the Maryland gubernatorial race due to a recent diagnosis of clinical depression. Duncan also emphatically endorsed his former primary rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who will now get a clear shot at incumbent Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, and vice-versa. I used to live in MoCo, and have also been around Duncan at DLC events, and appreciate him as a first-rate administrator who has come to dominate political life in a jurisdiction whose citizens, heavily including top-level federal employees, have extremely high standards for local government services. I obviously wish him well in his recovery from depression, but at the same time am relieved that he has abandoned an uphill fight against O’Malley that definitely required a negative campaign for which Duncan was temperamentally unsuited, and that would have helped Ehrlich in the general election. As for O’Malley, he has his detractors in Baltimore and elsewhere, but the man really does possess a notable “it” factor that led a lot of people to start talking about him as a potential presidential candidate about two minutes after his first election as mayor. His personal charisma is authentic and strong, and not only because women tend to find him very attractive (I once asked a young female colleague what she thought about O’Malley, and she simply smiled and said: “Meeow!” Appropriately, O’Malley is very scrupulous about avoiding situations where he is alone with women to whom he is not married). In fact, O’Malley, along with Barack Obama, has long been a candidate for the much-longed-for Bobby Kennedy role in the Democratic Party: a politician whose appeal transcends party or faction and potentially could create a new majority. Like RFK and Obama, O’Malley is hard to shoehorn ideologically; he’s always been close to the DLC (hosting two of our annual meetings), but he also endorsed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Like Bill Clinton, the closest thing we’ve had to Bobby since his assassination, O’Malley is a policy innovator who is completely open to new ideas, wherever they come from. But now he must face Ehrlich, the guy who in 2002 snuffed the potential national political career of RFK’s actual daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Ehrlich will almost certainly run a nasty negative campaign against O’Malley, and the mayor’s ability to rise above the fray and seek new allies for the progressive cause will be tested as never before.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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February 26: Tanden Confirmation Fight Not an Existential Threat for Biden Administration
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’s been 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.