Earlier this week, I wrote about the possibility of an intra-conservative fight over defense spending, as sparked by Haley Barbour’s vague but forceful talk about refusing to exempt the Pentagon from scrutiny, and Tim Pawlenty’s hostile response to this idea.
It’s still too early to tell if this argument will become a serious issue on the Right, but it’s sure sparking some serious initial exchanges of fire. Barbour’s act of heresy earned him a contemptuous slap from neocon poohbah Bill Kristol, framed in about as insulting a manner as he could find. In a piece entitled “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” Kristol said this about Barbour’s central contention on defense spending:
This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon–apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.
Ouchy.
Ol’ Haley’s son, Sterling Barbour, responded with an email accusing Kristol of “assassinating the character of a great conservative,” and concluding with this whiny anathema:
My dad would tell me to leave this alone. And for the record, I have never heard him say an ill word against you. And he never will. He is the consummate team player. Maybe we should rename him the anti-you?
Now I don’t know what sort of personal issues are behind the Kristol/Barbour flareup. But aside from the healthy impact of any discussion of defense spending as a big part of the country’s fiscal problems, any topic that gets conservatives going after each other with claw hammers so quickly elicits a two-word comment from this Donkey: Hee Haw!
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.