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Neera Tanden’s Potential Defeat Should Be a Victory For Progressives. But It’s Not.
As I write this, the fate of President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, remains unknown. At least one Democrat — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who would have been comfortably in the center of the Republican party of thirty years ago — has already said he will vote against her nomination. Some relatively moderate Republicans, such as Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, have also indicated they will vote against Tanden. It is very possible that Tanden will become the first major defeat of Biden’s term. And her rejection is deeply problematic.
Let me be clear that I will shed no tears for Neera Tanden. There are few Democrats who have shown themselves to be greater enemies of progressive values and significant change than she has. She is a close ally of the Clintons, an entrenched status quo neoliberal Democrat who has worked diligently to thwart efforts at universal health care; she exposed the identity of someone who was alleging sexual harassment at the Center for American Progress (CAP) where she is the president; and she opposes raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. She supported the invasion of Libya and, very much like Donald Trump, even suggested that Libyan oil be used to pay the U.S. for taking out its dictator Moammar Qaddafi.
In my own experience, I observed closely how Tanden purged some of the best journalists in the foreign policy field from CAP’s blog, Think Progress over their criticism of Israeli policies and eventually shut Think Progress down when it attempted to unionize. More importantly, mere months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked with Republicans to undermine Barack Obama’s efforts to reach a deal to prevent the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, Tanden defied her own community and brought Netanyahu in for a talk hosted at CAP. Tanden was warm and friendly with Netanyahu, asking him largely softball questions and hardly challenging him at all.
Tanden, while leading CAP, solicited and received donations for that ostensibly “progressive” institution from such sources as: Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Walmart, Bain Capital, BlueCross/BlueShield, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Bank of America, Google, and other…
