With the scheduled respective House and Senate committee votes on Neera Tanden's nomination to head the White house Office of Management and Budget being pulled this morning until further notice, it's a near-certainty at this point that her bid is sunk, and I can't help but think she was the Biden administration's sacrificial lamb all along.
Just about everyone in Washington, D.C., could see that Neera Tanden’s nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget was beleaguered from the beginning — everyone, that is, except the White House.
At the time her nomination was announced, Democrats didn’t even control the Senate and Tanden’s history of sharp-elbowed politics and highly personal Twitter attacks had made her enemies on the left and right. But Biden and his team, headed by White House chief of staff Ron Klain, felt strongly that they could sway Republicans to back her. When Democrats won the runoffs in Georgia, their gamble looked more prescient.
Today, the White House can’t even get all Democrats on board. And Mitch McConnell is urging the GOP to band together to take Tanden down.
Biden and his aides insist that Tanden’s prospects are not doomed. But her fate now hinges on Sen. Lisa Murkowski swooping in to save the nomination. Even if the independent-minded Alaska Republican were to do that, the saga would still mark one of the biggest missteps of Biden’s still-young presidency, one that raises questions about the White House’s political acumen and its ability to manage relations on the Hill. The president himself on Tuesday seemed to accept that the Tanden nom could end in defeat.
“We’re going to push,” Biden said on Tuesday. “We still think there’s a shot, a good shot.”
Tanden’s nomination became imperiled last Friday when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced his opposition, a development that took Democrats by surprise. But the seeds of her rocky reception on the Hill were planted with White House miscalculations weeks beforehand — among them, that moderate Senate Democrats would rally behind the president’s slate of nominees and that Republican resistance would soften.
“Around here the opposition is always looking for the person that they can put a fight up about. And she would be the obvious one to cull from the herd,” said one Senate Democrat, referring to the wall of GOP opposition Tanden faced from the beginning.
For a while, the White House felt Tanden would avoid her current fate. She atoned for her now infamous Twitter behavior and put forward her personal story of a hardscrabble life, living on food stamps and raised by a single mother. And allies like former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who consults frequently with the White House, predicted that both parties would get on board due to the historic nature of her nomination: Tanden would become the first South Asian woman to head up the agency. Inside the White House, endorsements from the Chamber of Commerce and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels — an ex-OMB chief himself — were pushed out in hopes that they would give Republicans cover to back her.
Elsewhere, there was a belief that the Trump years, in which the Senate confirmed Mick Mulvaney and Russ Vought as OMB directors after long careers in conservative politics, would make it difficult to oppose a nominee because of the tenor of her tweets.
“The truth is that she’s been critical of the left and the right. What the hell? I actually know her, I think she’s a good person,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “I don’t think the fight’s over with. Not ‘til she’s either pulled or the vote is negative.”
But those bets weren’t supplemented by an aggressive lobbying effort on Tanden’s behalf. One senior Democratic Senate staffer complained that even early on in her confirmation fight, the White House was lackluster in its advocacy for her and tone-deaf to the chillier reception she was getting on the Hill. There were questions about how many champions she even had at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Who does she have? Ron Klain. That’s her constituency,” the staffer said.
The reality is I think her nomination was always going to be the goat staked out for the T-Rex, and of course it's a woman of color being served up to appease both moderate white Democrats like Manchin and the GOP. Maybe I'm just cynical, maybe Biden needs a reality check, maybe politics is bad.
Or maybe Manchin's just an asshole because Tanden dinged his CEO daughter for price gouging on Epipens back in 2016.
The idea that only CEO contributes to a company's growth and not all employees is really pernicious https://t.co/2d9xgU0IHJ
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) August 27, 2016
At this point it looks like a combination of all of the above. We'll see if she survives but my feeling is that she'll be pulled next week and that he replacement, who will almost certainly be another woman of South Asian descent, will also be viciously attacked by the GOP.
Tanden is more than qualified, and has worked with and for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but she's not good enough.
Or maybe she's too good.
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