It’s been a tumultuous Sunday for the Obama administration and New Mexico Democrats, as NM Governor and Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson removed himself from consideration for the Cabinet pending the completion of a federal investigation of road contracts granted to a Richardson political contributor.
It’s unclear at this point how much if any evidence of wrongdoing has been gathered. The timing of any continuing “pay for play” investigation is obviously bad, thanks to Rod Blagojevich. We also don’t know if Richardson jumped out of the Commerce nomination or was pushed. Certainly the amounts of money involved in the suspected quid ($110,000 in contributions to two Richardson political funds) or the suspected quo ($1.48 million in state highway work) were not very large.
This development, however it turns out, is a definite bummer for New Mexico’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish, who was preparing to take office. Richardson has made it clear he will resume his gubernatorial duties, but he’s term-limited in 2010. Denish will almost certainly run for the job then, but apparently without the benefits of incumbency, if incumbency really is a benefit to anyone trying to govern in the current economic environment.
There’s no hint of names so far to replace Richardson as Commerce Secretary; since his was one of the first announcements made, speculation had not developed very far as to alternatives. One political problem for Team Obama is that the putative Cabinet has now lost its most prominent Latino.
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.
