John McCain’s decision to go right over the brink and start attacking Obama’s tax plan as “welfare” associates him with one of the hoariest of right-wing arguments: the idea that refundable income tax credits for people with payroll tax but not income tax liability amount to welfare payments.
It’s also an argument that none other than George W. Bush famously repudiated back in 1999, when House Republicans tried (for short-term budget purposes) to change earned income tax credit refunds to a monthly rather than annual payment, on the theory (loudly championed by Tom DeLay) that such payments were nothing more than welfare, and should be paid out like welfare. And at about the same time, it was repudiated by, yes, John McCain, who said Congress shouldn’t “tamper with a much-needed tax credit for working Americans.”
It speaks volumes about McCain’s campaign that he’s now flip-flopped on this very fundamental and entirely familiar issue, and embraced the political ghost of Tom DeLay. In combination with his earlier espousal of the ACORN/CRA/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac conspiracy theory blaming poor and minority people for the housing and financial crisis, his identification with the implicitly racist “voter fraud” canard, and his heavy-handed evocation of the terrible tax burden imposed by shiftless people on Joe the Plumber, there’s no longer any doubt that the oh-so-honorable John McCain in engaged in race-baiting demogoguery of the highest order.
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.