What the Neera Tanden Affair Reveals About the Washington DC Swamp
By David Sirota, Guardian UK
01 March 21
In defense of an awful nominee and a corrupt DC culture, Republicans engage
in hypocrisy while Democrats trample the causes they purport to care about
Ihen sifting through the wreckage to try to make sense of this epoch, future
anthropologists should dust off whatever records will be preserved about
Neera Tanden's star-crossed nomination to an obscure-but-powerful White
House office.
The whole episode is a museum-ready diorama in miniature illustrating so
many things that died in the transition from democracy to oligarchy. And in
this affair, all the politicians, pundits, news outlets and Democratic party
apparatchiks involved are very blatantly telling on themselves.
Tanden is being nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, which
oversees the federal budget. As a political operative and head of a
corporate-funded thinktank, she does not have especially relevant experience
for the appointment - in fact, whether in gubernatorial administrations,
mayoral offices or Capitol Hill budget committees, there are far more
qualified experts for this gig.
Moreover, her particular record would raise significant red flags as a job
applicant for even a mid-level management position in any organization, much
less the White House: during her tenure running the Center for American
Progress, she reportedly outed a sexual harassment victim and physically
assaulted an employee. While she was running the organization, CAP raked in
corporate and foreign government cash and a report was revised in a way that
helped a billionaire donor avoid scrutiny of his bigoted policing policy.
Critics allege that Tanden busted a union of journalists. And she floated
social security cuts when Democrats in Congress were trying to stop them.
Even if you discount Tanden's infamous statement about Libya and oil, as
well as her vicious crusade against Senator Bernie Sanders and the
progressive base of the Democratic party, all of these other items would
seem to disqualify Tanden for a job atop a Democratic administration that
claims to respect expertise and want to protect women, workers' rights,
social programs and government ethics.
From the beginning, every single Democratic senator could have simply cited
Biden's promise to be the "most pro-union president" and stated that they
would not vote to confirm anyone accused of undermining a union. Or they
could have said that they are not going to allow someone who runs a
corporate-funded thinktank - and whose nomination is being boosted by one of
the most diabolical corporate lobbying groups in Washington - to be in
charge of the White House office that can grant government ethics waivers.
At the absolute barest minimum, these issues should have been major topics
of discussion in her confirmation hearings and in the news media.
But the opposite has happened. This record is almost nowhere to be found in
the discourse. Instead, the central topic of discussion is Tanden's
late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting.
On the right, the Republican party of troll-in-chief Donald Trump is
pretending that Tanden's online rhetoric - rather than her record - is
disqualifying.
On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican
party's hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These
self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual
record.
Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting,
journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden's
tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are
even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and
distracting attention from Tanden's alleged attack on a union of
journalists.
As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace,
which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the
Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will
not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable
reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. The debate is being
deliberately ramrodded into a conversation about her online etiquette, which
has absolutely no relevance to the actual appointment (and I say that as an
occasional target of Tanden's Twitter vitriol).
All of this is a grotesque form of erasure. Democratic politicians, Beltway
Liberals, and media voices are not merely swatting away, rationalizing or
justifying Tanden's record on the merits, they are doing something worse:
they are trying to memory-hole Tanden's record and pretend it doesn't exist,
even though she laid waste to the same liberal causes these defenders
purport to care about.
Moreover, the Tanden brigade - and their online army now bullying reporters
with racist vitriol - are cynically relying on a political and media
environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are
banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of
distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are
exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career
advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal
connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any
social cause.
Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise.
They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are
supposed to inform democratic decision-making.
The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the
Washington media wants to center Tanden's nomination on her actual record,
because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in
Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career
prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.
Indeed, if corruption, mismanagement, bullying, union busting and
let-them-eat-cake-style austerity ideology are suddenly perceived
negatively, then all the real-life Veep characters in Washington - the
politicians, operatives and media elites who've spent their whole lives
angling for fancy White House titles - could be out of luck.
Appreciating the power of this tribal motivation is crucial, because it
accounts for why Democrats seem to be spending as much or more political
capital on trying to rescue Tanden's nomination than on enacting policies to
rescue Americans from an economic disaster. That's no overstatement: the
White House has signaled it is working the phones and pulling out all the
stops for the OMB nominee at the very same time the administration is
signaling a potential pre-emptive retreat on the minimum wage and a
willingness to limit promised survival checks.
Such skewed priorities and misguided decisions might seem inexplicable to
those future anthropologists looking back at this moment. However, it will
all make perfect sense to them if they understand that the Tanden affair
exemplifies how in this era of end-stage democracy, the first and foremost
priority of the effete political elite wasn't helping millions of people, it
wasn't defending the progressive agenda, and it wasn't even ensuring
electoral success.
It was something deeper, more tribal, and more corrupt: swamp
self-preservation.