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Home→Tags Joe Biden Transition

Tag Archives: Joe Biden Transition

12/14 News Roundup & OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on December 14, 2020 by BennyDecember 14, 2020

Bernie Sanders and Our Winter of Progressive Discontent

Bernie Sanders is not in a good political position right now. Yes, he continues to speak vital truths to—and about—power. His ability to reach a national audience with progressive wisdom and specific proposals is unmatched. And, during the last several decades, no one has done more to move the nation’s discourse leftward. But now, Sanders is in a political box.

After a summer and fall dominated by the imperative of defeating Donald Trump, progressive forces are entering a winter of discontent. Joe Biden has offered them little on the list of top personnel being named to his administration. While Sanders wants to maintain a cordial relationship with the incoming president, he doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

Sanders has tried to call in some political chits, but Biden—probably figuring that Sanders won’t really go to the mat—does not seem to care much.
“The progressive movement deserves a number of seats—important seats—in the Biden administration,” Sanders said last week. “Have I seen that at this point? I have not.”

Sanders foreshadowed the current situation back in mid-November, when he told The Associated Press: “It seems to me pretty clear that progressive views need to be expressed within a Biden administration. It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’—and there’s some discussion that that’s what he intends to do—which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats—but which ignored the progressive community. I think that would be very, very unfortunate.”

At this point, Sanders and avid supporters of the Bernie 2020 campaign have ample reasons to feel frustrated, even “enormously” insulted. It’s small comfort that Biden’s picks so far are purportedly “not as bad as Obama’s” were 12 years ago. That’s a low bar, especially to those who understand that Barack Obama heavily corporatized his presidency from the outset. And given the past decade’s leftward political migration among Democrats and independents at the grassroots, Biden’s selections have been even more out of step with the party’s base.

Reporting on Biden’s overall selections as this week began, the Washington Post found that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their resumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.”

Biden conveyed notable disregard for Sanders by nominating an OMB director with a long record of publicly expressing antagonism toward him. The Post just reported that “the transition team never reached out to” Sanders about “Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings.”

Away from Capitol Hill, many progressive organizations are regrouping while “the Bernie movement” evaporates. Coalescing in its place are a range of resilient, overlapping movements that owe much of their emergent long-term power to his visionary leadership.

Nationally, Sanders became a shaper of history in unprecedented ways. Unlike almost every other major candidate for president in our lifetimes, he has always been part of social movements. For 30 years, Sanders not only continued to have one foot in the streets and one foot in the halls of Congress; somehow, he often seemed to be relentlessly in both places with both feet.

Bernie Sanders has fulfilled what the legendary progressive activist and theoretician Saul Alinsky described as a key goal of political organizers—to work themselves out of a job—so that other activists will become ready, willing and able to carry on.

At this juncture, while Sanders is ill-positioned and uninclined to push back very hard against the evident trajectory of Biden’s decisions, many progressives are starting to throw down gauntlets against the corporate and militaristic aspects of the incoming presidency. While the lunacy of the Trumpian GOP is nonstop and corporate Democrats have control of party top-down power levers, the broad democratic left is now stronger, better-funded and better-networked than it has been in many decades, with greatly enhanced electoral capacities as well as vitality of its social movements.

Those electoral capacities and social movements have long been intertwined with the tireless work of Bernie Sanders. But a crucial dynamic going forward into 2021 and beyond will be the resolve of progressives to methodically challenge the Biden administration. Senator Sanders is unlikely to have the leverage or inclination to lead the fight.

Sanders has tried to call in some political chits, but Biden—probably figuring that Sanders won’t really go to the mat—does not seem to care much. Days ago, Sanders said in an interview with Axios: “I’ve told the Biden people: The progressive movement is 35-40 percent of the Democratic coalition. Without a lot of other enormously hard work on the part of grassroots activists and progressives, Joe would not have won the election.”

Bernie Sanders was the catalyst for galvanizing the grassroots progressive power that propelled his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. His deep analysis, tenacity, eloquence and bold actions created new pathways. As this century enters its third decade, the torch needs to be grasped by others to lead the way.

More news, views, videos, and tweets in the comments. See you there!

Posted in 2020 Elections, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, grassroots, News, Open Thread, Video | Tagged Joe Biden Transition

11/30 Biden Makes Shrewd Move in Choosing Neera Tanden for OMB; News Roundup & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on November 29, 2020 by BennyNovember 30, 2020

As announced last night on WSJ digital, Biden has chosen a number of women for senior posts in communication and also in the OMB. First, I’ll do the communications team leaders and advisors, since it is historic that they are all women.

From the WSJ:

President-elect Joe Biden said Jen Psaki, a former White House communications director, will be his press secretary, one of seven women named to top communications roles Sunday.

Ms. Psaki, who has been overseeing the confirmation process for the transition, served in several top roles in the Obama administration, including as State Department spokeswoman.

In addition to Ms. Psaki, Mr. Biden said that his White House communications director will be Kate Bedingfield, who served in the same role for his campaign. Pili Tobar will be deputy communications director, and Karine Jean-Pierre will serve as principal deputy press secretary. Ms. Tobar worked as the communications director for coalitions for Mr. Biden’s campaign, and Ms. Jean-Pierre served as chief of staff to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris during the campaign.

Symone Sanders will serve as senior adviser and chief spokesperson for Ms. Harris, and Ashley Etienne was named her communications director. Elizabeth Alexander will be communications director for first lady Jill Biden. All three served as senior advisers during the campaign.

That’s quite a role for Symone Sanders, considering she’s only been part of the consultant class for 5 years.

Then there was more news about the economics advisors, particularly for budget priorities and policies:

Mr. Biden has chosen Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget. The former vice president has picked Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton University labor economist, to be chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, these people said.

The president-elect has selected Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, to serve as Ms. Yellen’s top deputy at the Treasury Department. And he will turn to two campaign economic advisers, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, to serve as members of the CEA alongside Ms. Rouse, the people said.

Mr. Biden’s selections include outspoken advocates for aggressive fiscal stimulus to help return the economy quickly to its pre-pandemic health, a cause that could run into resistance in a closely divided Congress. The advisers are also known for advocating expanded government spending they say would boost the economy’s long-term potential, in areas that are liberal priorities such as education, infrastructure and the green economy, and policy changes aimed at narrowing racial disparities in the economy.

Several of the choices, including Ms. Rouse, Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Adeyemo, are former Obama administration officials who played key roles in the aftermath of the financial crisis

Cecilia Rouse would be the first woman of color to chair the Council of Economic Advisers.

Of course, many of us aren’t thrilled about Clinton/Obama party hacks consulting class elites such as the appointment of Tanden to the OMB. I was doing some superficial web searching on Nanden’s background. We’ll look at the very basics from Wikipedia since there’s not much information about her, and what little there is tends to have a slightly positive ring to it.

She worked with President Bill Clinton’s campaign on new energy policies, and health-care reform, as associate director for domestic policy in the Clinton White House,[11] and as senior advisor in the First Lady’s Office.

In 1999 and 2000, Tanden was deputy campaign manager and issues director for Hillary Clinton during her successful senatorial campaign in New York.[12] In that capacity, she crafted policy proposals for the campaign.[13][14][11] After the election, Tanden served as Senator Clinton’s Legislative Director from 2003 to 2005.[11]

She served as Hillary Clinton’s policy director for her unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, shaping its policy proposals.[4][7] Tanden supervised debate preparation for Senator Clinton’s participation in the Democratic presidential nomination debates during 2007 and 2008.[11]

Continuing her association with Hillary Clinton, Tanden was an unpaid adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s successful 2016 primary season nomination campaign and unsuccessful general election campaign in opposition to Republican candidate Donald Trump, while also running the Center for American Progress. Tanden was considered a candidate for a top White House job, had Mrs. Clinton won the presidency.[8] After Clinton secured the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, Tanden was named to her transition team.[15]

2008 Obama general election campaign member – After Barack Obama was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, Tanden was one of the first, and also one of the few, former Clinton campaign staffers to join his team;[16] she served as Domestic Policy Director for his successful general election campaign, where she managed all domestic policy proposals for the campaign.[7][17]

Obama administration in HHS -Tanden also served in the Obama administration as senior adviser to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the Department of Health and Human Services. She helped to draft the administration’s health care legislation, including work specific to its proposed, but later withdrawn, public option.[18] [14][19][20] She also negotiated with Congress and stakeholders on several provisions of the bill.[16][11] She has been described as one of the “key architects” of the Affordable Care Act.[21]

Thomas and Davidson at WSJ are quick to note that progressives will be critical of these choices.

Some members of the economic team are likely to please party progressives. All three members of the CEA are known for their work giving greater prominence in policy debates to inequality. But others may draw some criticism from the left. Ms. Tanden has publicly tangled with allies of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Mr. Adeyemo has worked at BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, a potential red flag for some progressives opposed to any nominees with ties to Wall Street.

I’ve been thinking about the Team of Rivals and The Queen’s Gambit (on Netflix, about a girl who becomes the world’s greatest player in chess), in which there is some thought to strategy, it is a very shrewd move by Biden to slide Tanden in that slot. My hunch is Tanden was first considered for Secretary of HHS, but that was nixed — possibly because of the ire she would draw from progressives, and she would have not had an easy confirmation from GOP’ers. Tanden has worked on some policy stuff, but this really is more of a DNC membership reward, and it is bound to draw attention to the budget, especially if Senator Sanders miraculously is able to become chairman of the Budget appropriations committee. Tanden will make for interesting theater whenever she has to appear in front of Congress. However, this is a big risk because of the potential outcome of the GA senate race. My sense is Biden is signaling they aren’t planning for a 50-50 Senate.

There could be one other upside, but this is not likely to happen. What if former campaign manager Faiz Shakir ended up up taking over CAP–after all he has a great deal of experience under his belt, including working at CAP previously — and hire the likes of Matt Stoller and reach out more to academics, just as Bernie did for the first couple of years after the 2016 election — and ditch Brainwrap (who allegedly had some part-time gig there at one time). But looking at the press releases of CAP, it looks like Podesta will likely have a heavy hand in selecting Tanden’s successor.

I need a Neera Tanden expert for my show. Suggestions!

— Katie Halper (@kthalps) November 30, 2020

I responded to Halper to get Faiz. If he goes on the show, maybe he’s decided CAP really is in his rearview mirror.

Reactions by progressives are posted below, along with other news of the day. This serves as an open thread.

Posted in Bernie Sanders | Tagged consultant class, DNC, Joe Biden Transition, Neera Tanden

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