HRC’s campaign is not the only one getting some extra scrutiny this week. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has done a major article analyzing the personnel and strategy of John McCain’s campaign. He unravels the complex John Weaver-Rick Davis rivalry that’s been at the center of the campaign’s various purges and power struggles. And he also explains the odd Davis-driven decision to organize the general election campaign around a “regional autonomy” model that sounds a bit like one of those plans for stabilizing Iraq.
One thought I had after reading Jason’s fine piece is that it’s clear McCain’s back-from-the-grave nomination victory will tend to freeze the current campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message into place even if they aren’t necessarily right for the general election. That, after all, is how John Kerry wound up going into the 2004 general election with a questionable campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message. At about this stage four years ago, I can remember some Kerry supporters muttering to each other things like: “How can you convince a candidate his campaign is making potentially fatal mistakes when he’s just won the nomination after being left for dead?” I wonder if any McCainiacs are muttering similar things to each other today.
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.
