Earlier this month, I did a post recounting all the reasons it was exceedingly weird to find John McCain doing a campaign appearance in Iowa.
Now, more than two weeks later, with the McCain campaign having told reporters that Iowa is already lost, and with its efforts now being focused on PA, VA, NC, IN, FL, and maybe NH, guess what? Both John McCain and Sarah Palin are going to spend time in Iowa this weekend.
The only thing that’s changed in the last couple of weeks is that the one polling outfit that failed to show Obama ahead in Iowa at any point during the entire year–the Big Ten Battleground consortium–now shows Obama up by 13 points. The RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls for the last month has Obama up by 12.5 points, and comfortably over 50%.
The irony is that if McCain had shown anything like this sort of stubborn interest in Iowa during the Caucus seasons of 2000 and 2008, he might well be in a position to win the state.
But hey, I’m sure the one person who’s happy about this is Sarah Palin, who may be getting a head start on her 2012 Iowa Caucus campaign.
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.