It’s safe to say that a new conventional wisdom arose in Washington last week, which solidified over a weekend of gabbing: Barack Obama’s budget proposal does indeed reflect an effort to implement a generation of progressive policy thinking–nothing more, nothing less. It’s all there, and it’s all that’s there, from restored progressivity in income tax rates, to a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, to a step towards a privately-delivered but publicly-guaranteed universal health care system, to a big increase in the federal involvement in elementary and secondary education, and so on through a long list.
That the budget is being almost universally denounced by Republicans as the work of the devil, or of Lenin and Stalin, is a sign of how little progress progressives have made towards implementing their consensus agenda over the last couple of decades.
One reason for conservative shrieking about the Obama budget is that they may be at an institutional disadvantage in defeating it, as opposed to the economic stimulus package. If Obama and his congressional allies are able to get the bulk of the legislation contained in a budget “reconciliation” package, it will be subject to special time limitations and will be immune from a Senate filibuster. That’s how Ronald Reagan got much of his agenda enacted in one bill in 1981. If, as the Right has been saying lately, Obama is determined to end the Reagan era once and for all, it’s certainly appropriate that he use the same fast-track procedures as the Gipper.
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.
