Yesterday’s staff post on the Sotomayor hearings noted in an update that the apparent Republican decision to focus on the Ricci case and affirmative action was a rather edgy strategy given the risk of alienating proud Latino supporters of the woman conservatives are mocking as the “wise Latina.”
The hazard of this strategy was emphasized today in a quote from NDN’s Simon Rosenberg that appeared in a long Dan Balz WaPoarticle about the Sotomayor hearings:
If during the next few weeks the Republicans appear to be playing politics with race rather than raising legitimate issues about Sotomayor’s judicial approach, it could reinforce the deep impression that the Republican Party’s anachronistic and intolerant approach to race and diversity is making them less capable of leading a very different and more racially diverse America of the early 21st century.
Simon’s an astute observer of Latino political opinion, and he’s right: if Republicans really are wary of the impression of appearing to be some sort of white identity politics party, they sure are playing with fire if they make the Sotomayor hearings about affirmative action. It would be smarter for them to stay in the dog-whistle territory of abstractions about “judicial activism,” which the unhappy Cultural Right will understand as a reference to Roe v. Wade, instead of blundering into a debate over race and diversity that will raise temperatures in a way that is almost guaranteed to increase the already formidable Latino solidarity with Sotomayor, and hostility to the GOP.
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.