Neera Tanden probably shouldn’t have tweeted so much—on that, it seems, everyone can agree.
While the new congress navigates a stimulus package for the COVID-19 ravaged country and the new president negotiates a new kind of relationship with the state murder-sanctioning Saudi regime, Biden’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget has given us the new administration’s first petty-seeming scrum: As the head of establishment liberal think tank the Center for American Progress for the past nine years, Tanden tweeted reams of nasty personal attacks against Republicans, progressive Democrats, and non-famous Twitter users who disagreed with her. They’re all mad about it, and as a result, her confirmation is in peril.
For the past couple of weeks in various hearing rooms Republicans in particular have read Tanden the riot act. “You called Sen. Sanders everything but an ignorant slut,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy said to her, proving Twitter’s unerring ability to drive even the most powerful toward undignified abasement for attention. Last Wednesday, after several key senate votes slipped away from Tanden—including Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin—her hearings were delayed, leading reporters to ask the White House if it would soon be withdrawing her nomination.
In glomming onto Tanden’s tweets (she’s now deleted a thousand and apologized) despite their ability to overlook countless far more divisive missives from President Trump, Republican senators are doing the sort of surface level swatting at shiny objects that we’ve come to expect from the polarized Congress. But if we look at what lies beneath the brittle surface of the tweets controversy, we actually find something instructive: The Tanden confirmation is a preview of what the slightly twisted dynamics of Biden-era Washington will probably look like.
Unfortunately for Tanden, she has found herself pinched in the gears as the power center of the Democratic Party shifts to the left—the rise of prominent progressive figures like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has coincided with a larger proportion of Democratic voters identifying as “liberal” than ever before. Even if the party hasn’t wholly given over to the Sanders view of things (just look at Manchin and fellow moderate Democratic Sen. Krysten Sinema’s leverage over what passes through the Senate), what was once de rigeur political practice (courting Wall Street money to fund liberal causes, for instance) is getting a thorough once-over. As for conservatives, they’re more than happy to drag off the Democrats’ conflict, supporting whatever faction suits their own ideological interests issue by issue, or just generally inserting chaotic “but-what-about-bipartisanship?” energy into legislative debates.
A key player who’s been overlooked somewhat in all the clatter about tweets is Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, who gave a preview of what was to come on the first day of Tanden’s hearings by aligning himself with an unlikely-seeming ally: “Let me begin by picking up a point that the ranking member, Lindsay Graham made,” Sanders began, citing a letter from House GOP members that outlined a number of complaints about Tanden, including her inflammatory Twitter feed. “Your attacks were not just made against Republicans, they were vicious attacks made against progressives, people who I have worked with. Me personally.” In other words, Sanders, who spent years on the fringes of left-leaning politics—pooh-poohed by mainstream Clintonian Democrats like Tanden—was finally in the seat of power, and Tanden was the one on the spot.
The history of bad blood between Tanden and the Sanders-supporting wing of the party goes back years. She served as a legislative aide for Hillary Clinton and worked for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. When Clinton did a candidate interview at the Center for American Progress (CAP) during that run, she was asked about her vote in favor of the Iraq War by Faiz Shakir, who at that time worked for the think tank’s popular blog (he would later run Sanders’s presidential campaign). As a 2019 New York Times piece recounted, Tanden was upset by the question and after the meeting, according to people in the room, she punched Shakir in the chest. Tanden contented that she only pushed him.
In a 2016 interview with Politico, after the Democratic primaries but before Clinton would go on to lose to Trump, Tanden blamed Clinton’s low trust numbers on Sanders, saying that attacks from the left were more damaging than anything that had been hurled Clinton’s way by Republicans in 2008. In 2019, in the heat of the primaries, Sanders wrote a letter to the board of CAP—which Tanden was running by then—expressing his anger at a video that ThinkProgress, CAP’s blog, had posted about him. Sanders said the organization was also targeting Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. “Neera Tanden repeatedly calls for unity while simultaneously maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas. I worry that the corporate money CAP is receiving is inordinately and inappropriately influencing the role it is playing in the progressive movement.” A Washington Post analysis found that between 2014 and 2019, CAP had received $33 million in donations from Wall Street-associated firms, philanthropies, or individuals.
It was history like this that roiled Sanders supporters when Tanden’s name was floated for OMB director in late 2020. “A big slap in the face,” is what one Sanders 2020 campaign aide told Politico. Since Biden won, progressives have been girding their loins for the post-Trump continuation of the battles of the primary season. When I spoke to some progressive activists and aides in the fall of 2020, they were already angsting over Biden’s potential “hang-ups” about deficit spending in the face of another 2009-esque stimulus bill. And now Biden, for what it’s worth, looks like he’s making some big concessions to the progressives in his party, throwing unprecedented support behind a unionization effort by Amazon workers.
Republicans getting in on the feud has done much of Sanders progressives’ work in batting back Tanden’s nomination for them, which seems like a dynamic that’s likely to happen again in Biden’s D.C. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” types of relationships—interest alignment is what a lot of legislative work is built on—seem particularly likely to blossom because Democrats control both chambers of congress and the White House, yet are still grappling with internal ideological divisions. Remember when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that in another country’s system she and Biden wouldn’t be in the same political party? She and other progressives feel the same way about Manchin, the Senate’s new moderate king-maker. Manchin, for his part, got the cover he needed from Republicans objecting to Tanden to give an easy “no” on a nominee from his own party—something that’s a political necessity for a man representing one of the most conservative states in the country.
The ideological waters have also been somewhat muddied with the Tanden affair because as never-Trump conservative Bill Kristol put it, ‘these tweets sound harsher to these old guys because they’re coming from a woman.’” People have pointed out that Manchin, in addition to coming out against Tanden (who is of South Asian descent), had signaled he might not support Rep. Deb Haaland, Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Interior and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe—she is a former environmental activist and Manchin is from a coal-reliant state. Ocasio-Cortez, who is close to Haaland, tweeted that Manchin had supported Jeff Sessions’s nomination, “Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?” (Manchin has since said he’ll support Haaland.)
You don’t have to look far to find progressives calling bullshit on cries of sexism against Tanden, accusing her supporters of perverting identity politics for their own gain. Briahna Joy Gray, a former Sanders press secretary, said that Tanden was “on the record as being willing to cut the very social programs she cites as a justification for being well suited to this position and that is at its core an incredibly cynical manipulation of peoples’ sincere value for identity.” (This is, presumably, an allusion to the fact that Tanden relied on federal “entitlement” programs like food stamps and public housing as a child; some on the left have taken issue with Tanden’s past statements about a willingness to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.) Charges of weaponizing identity politics in a battle about the corporatized nature of the American political system is about as “2021 Democratic Party” as you can get.
Another OMB nominee is potentially already waiting in the wings—Shalanda Young has been given the seal of approval by at least one Republican senator—though Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sinema could still save Tanden’s nomination. Sanders, for his part, has remained mum on how he’d vote. Beyond Tanden, the new, twisty D.C. dynamic faces more substantive tests: the Democrats’ stimulus package is heading to the Senate for a vote, though it’s saddled with a provision for a $15 minimum wage—a massive priority for progressives—that the Senate parliamentarian has said is against the body’s rules.
A compromise will be needed—and once again prominent GOP Senators seem willing to ally with the left, this time in the interests of appealing to the populist factions that have taken on more power in the Trump-era GOP. Now-notorious Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (see: Jan 6 insurrection) has a $15 minimum wage plan of his own (for certain businesses), while Romney and fellow Republican Sen Tom Cotton have proposed a $10 plan. (Sanders wants to take tax credits away from big businesses that don’t pay a $15 wage. Manchin, the probable swing vote, has cast his lot in with an $11 cap.) Hawley’s plan even got some pushback from old school Club For Growth conservatives at this past weekend’s CPAC conference, lending it some credence through criticism. The GOP has its own internal struggles—more Shakespearean than the Democrats’—to deal with, after all.