As Election Day recedes into memory and the harsh realities of day-to-day politics return, I’ve been covering several key developments at the Washington Monthly.
One is the increasingly phony “struggle for the soul of the Republican Party” in which ideology stands virtually untouched, only a few strategic options are discussed, and most of the heat is over tactics, personalities, and blame. There’s now a phony conservative “backlash” building against phony criticism of conservatives, and you have to get up close to discern who is in what camp, so small are the differences.
The first signs of intra-Democratic dissension are emerging in the jittery anticipation of a possible fiscal agreement. But so far, this, too is a phony war, with factional mistrust and rumored behind-the-scenes betrayals taking the place of significant substantive disagreement.
As those focused on national politics await real news in the maneuvering on taxes and spending, a different reality is emerging in the states, where polarization on Election Day generally produced not gridlock but big partisan majorities. Divided control of state governments is at an historic low, and both parties have achieved super-majority status in a significant number of state legislative chambers. So even as pundits complain of unproductive stalemate in Washington, we could be on the brink of an era where states move in very different directions on a whole host of policy fronts, making the continuation of a federal safety net and regulatory presence more important than ever.
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.
