Mitt Romney’s win in MI yesterday forestalled the possibility of an early McCain sweep to the GOP nomination. But like Hillary Clinton’s “stunning upset” win in NH, the actual voter dynamics were less dramatic than the perceived impact on the race.
As Jay Cost explains at RealClearPolitics after staring at MI and NH exit polls, Romney and McCain pretty much attracted the same kind of voters in the former state as in the latter. Romney won by marginally improving his performance across the board, and also because the composition of the electorate was a bit different (e.g., fewer independents). Given Romney’s native-state status, his spending advantage, and his very blunt promises to bail out MI’s economy with federal money, his win, while a “shocker” in terms of shaking up the race, wasn’t really very surprising.
The problem for Romney is that his MI formula is not replicable elsewhere. And the problem for the GOP is that this continues to look like a nomination contest no one can win–and everyone can lose.
This doesn’t mean the Republican nomination will be decided at the Convention; delegates will be awarded in big batches on February 5, and it’s entirely possible that the field will effectively be down to two or three candidates by then. But the palpable lack of excitement in the GOP over its options is more striking than ever.
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.
