To revisit one of the issues I discussed in an exchange with Glenn Greenwald at Salon last week, there’s a new Gallup weekly presidential approval tracking poll out, and it’s another interesting data point on the question of whether the White House strategy of ignoring progressive advice to appeal to independent voters is significantly hurting him with the former group or helping him with the latter.
So far, the answer seems to be: no and no. For July 25-31, Gallup shows the president’s approval rating dropping to 42%, a new low for his entire presidency. But among self-identified liberals, his approval rating ticked up last week to 72%, pretty much where it’s been all year (the same characterization is true of his 78% approval rating among Democrats). Meanwhile, among self-identified independents, the approval number dropped to an all-time low of 37%, and among “pure independents” (i.e., those not objectively leaning towards either party) to an abysmal 28%, matching his all-time low.
Maybe as the debt limit deal sinks in, these numbers will change. But for the moment, whatever opinion-leaders in either camp say or think, rank-and-file progressives are sticking with Obama and indies are spurning his overtures. Go figure.
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.
