Democratic (Party) Direction

I don't mean that in a condescending asshole way ... just like, is this like a sports thread where people talk shit about the teams other posters like and that's what's expected and the people involved are all cool with it and it's fun? ... I mean, I can see how that could be fun, but this doesn't seem like that for a number of posters, except like, silbs.

The average age here is probably inching north of 40, I'd guess worldviews are pretty well set.

No, it's definitely not fun!

Perhaps foolishly, I thought that a Biden victory might allow me to feel cautiously hopeful about our political future, but increasingly it seems like the only way to do that is to disengage from political discourse altogether.

Hope should always be cautious. What's helped me is getting involved with the local party to throw the nincompoops and geriatrics out.

That seems like a good idea. I've been thinking about that after listening to Eitan Hersh talk to Chris Hayes about the pitfalls of "political hobbyism."

There are a couple of stumbling blocks for me, though:

1) I've always been more attracted to national politics as a subject of intellectual interest (and less so to the quotidian nature of local politics). Hersh addresses this point by claiming that national issues have roots in local issues, so you can find ways to combat racial injustice or climate change or whatever within your own community. But that doesn't satisfy my desire to think about things like polarization or long-term voting trends or how the national Democratic Party builds a winning coalition.

2) I live in Chicago, which is firmly Democratic, so the idea of making change at the local level doesn't feel as urgent as it would if I lived in Oklahoma (or, well, in Miami).

If you still have a police department there’s political change to be made locally and Democratic (Party) Direction you stand a chance of influencing directly with strongly worded letters and support for progressive primary campaigns.

I’d go so far as to call it urgent, even

also your mayor is lori lightfoot so i feel like there are some serious problems

I don't have a strong sense of those problems, though I know people don't like her. Need to read up more.

It's remarkable how quickly the most important election in the history of elections turned into 'well, none of these nominations really matter, none of this actually matters - President? Not actually that powerful an office. Queen of England-ish, really."

It's not so much that. The election mattered a lot, primarily for the purpose of preventing another 4 years of Donald Trump. In that sense, mission accomplished. But it was really just triage, imo.

I can't speak for anyone else's level of concern about the exact make-up or stated policy goals of the Biden administration, but even more than most presidencies this one to me feels provisional and fleeting. Not only because there's a general (and let's hope accurate) assumption that Biden won't run for a second term, but because the election did not provide his administration with a blue-wave mandate that would make it easier for him to get anything done. The best case for now is a split Senate that would be hard to bully, coax or cajole into any major progressive action. With the very real possibility of losing both the House and Senate in two years and a GOP trifecta in 2024.

Anything Biden and the Democrats can do to forestall those eventualities to me seem more important than whatever legislation can be goosed or greased through Congress in the next 18 months. There will of course be a lot of arguments about what steps those would be — people on the left will remain convinced we need more true progressive candidates, people in the center will wave around 2020 voting demographics, etc. But those are at least the arguments to be having, imo.

So there is no contradiction between "this was a very important election" and "the social media proclivities of the director of the OMB do not really matter much." This was a very important election, and so will be the next several.

Such a great choice to lead OMB. @NeeraTanden will bring the experience and humanity urgently needed in this position. Congratulations! https://t.co/a5q0RaZ9vR

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) November 30, 2020

Former OMB chief Mick Mulvaney says on Fox News that it "could be very, very difficult" to confirm Neera Tanden in a Republican Senate.

"To put someone like Neera Tanden in that office could be sending a strong message that this administration's going to go hardcore left."

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) November 30, 2020

the whole thing where the left hates someone and the right thinks they are a hardcore leftist gets so old

painting someone who’s most likely to be negotiating directly with republican congress members and is known to give a lot of concessions to the right as a hardcore leftist is a useful rhetorical trick, though

a nice rejoinder to that rhetoric would be to paint republicans as disinterested in any policy want unless it boosts the stock market or gives a handout to a corporation, but that’s not far off what a lot of democrats do :(

“known to give a lot of concessions to the right”?

totally...i get why it works but it's just exhausting mentally

after they successfully painted someone as temperamentally conservative as obama as a crazy terrorist radical i guess there was no going back

Neera Tanden is smart, experienced, and qualified for the position of OMB Director.

The American people decisively voted for change - Mitch McConnell shouldn’t block us from having a functioning government that gets to work for the people we serve.https://t.co/HX6FHVaaOD

— Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) November 30, 2020

They are going to say this about every single cabinet pick requiring confirmation.

Tanden was part of the group that was more than willing to make the ACA as amicable to large swaths of congress that had no interest in passing it and gained no votes by doing so, although private insurers appreciated it. She’s against single-payer healthcare, and while on paper she’s led an ostensibly left-wing think tank and website, her management of those didn’t exactly speak to her interest in their mission as much as their use as a vehicle for advancing her career

I’d take her in this role over many other possible nominees, but again, there’s a reason a lot of people are tired of the same careerists who have been waiting in the wings waiting for it to finally be their time popping up again

realistically, I guess there just aren’t that many people viewed as qualified at the national level and I’ll save my crankiness for when Rahm gets appointed

that's my position

and from what I've seen, Rahm is still a very strong possibility for DoT...

Dying of Tetanus, surely

I'm sympathetic to this take:

god what a funny appointment. it's like the definition of a job where you want someone with an anonymous public profile and organizational savvy instead of "boss that can't stop tweeting whose employees are often publicly mad at"

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) November 29, 2020

(re Tanden)

xxp I mean, even then, I’ll give them the possibility of working in ways contrary to their prior actions?

I’m not keeping a scorecard of best players to recruit here, I just want the results and policies — even if they’re not exact ideals — that have progressive outcomes.

I think that criticism of the people on the left groaning around these choices is off in that it’s seen as dead-end whining, when it’s looking at the prior track record of the nominees and putting two and two together about what kind of administration we’re looking at.

I don’t know that “whose employees are publicly mad at” is based on anything real though

Neera does perpetually seem like the manager who is in charge of a group where she’s not exactly interested in what they’re doing, but she wants to be seen in a leadership role :/

I mean, other than electing Hillary. She did always want that

uh Big Don have you read anything whatsoever?

Tanden was the one who killed ThinkProgress after the staff talked about unionizing, and mentioned the accuser in a workplace sexual harassment situation by name in a large group meeting

her former employees have been mad at her multiple times

She definitely tweets way too much though. Legit no joke fair criticism of the appointment imo.

I don’t know that “whose employees are publicly mad at” is based on anything real though

assuming it's fairly direct employment, this is one of the best and most trustworthy ways we have to judge people imo!

Reaching back to yesterday:

The OMB is in charge of disbursing federal funds. The director is not some faceless rubber stamp "providing analysis,"

This is ofc true. I was conflating the OMB with the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) which was a foolish and embarrassing error. Thanks, milo for pointing out my misinformation.

painting someone who’s most likely to be negotiating directly with republican congress members and is known to give a lot of concessions to the right as a hardcore leftist is a useful rhetorical trick, though

a nice rejoinder to that rhetoric would be to paint republicans as disinterested in any policy want unless it boosts the stock market or gives a handout to a corporation, but that’s not far off what a lot of democrats do :(

― mh, Monday, November 30, 2020 8:54 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Booming post.

xp I’m taking an online course on effectively communicating with coworkers/leadership right now (lol corporate training) and buy-in from peers and subordinates, along with getting leadership to support initiatives, were just mentioned

The least effective management I’ve experienced is a manager or leader who is only interested in what their own boss thinks of them

Just remembered recently that Tanden interviewed me for a job about 15 years ago, when I was just out of college. (I didn’t get the job.)

so is there a good article about Tanden and Think Progress? Did it close because she didn't approve of the unionizing? I'd think it wasn't making much money anyway.

iirc they were making a huge amount of money (some from the UAE) and herself was being paid $400k/year a few years ago

she herself

I think TP was up for sale at least a year before it closed.

sorry this is going to be too editorial for some here but it has a lot of links in it https://splinternews.com/the-center-for-american-progress-is-a-disgrace-1838008313

There are a lot of articles about it.

are any of them good articles though

lol

I think that sort of blog-like endeavor was kind of on the way out, but at the same time it was really the main public-facing presence for CAP and it would have made sense to, if not bring it onboard at CAP as a public mouthpiece, to rework their strategy for public engagement, which I think is very valuable for that kind of group

it was really a mixed bag, in that the initial slate of journalistic alumni from the organization went on to other endeavors that may have been closer to their own political tangents. to me, it comes down to whether you’re trying to publish and gauge interest for its own good, or if you’re running a platform where you’re cultivating the next era of talent

really, you want to do both because being seen as a springboard to bigger things is what draws people in, and when you fail to keep that momentum it seems more that you’ve been only a platform for showboating

*cough* Matt Yglesias and Zaid Jilani were from there

Fun fact: Since 2009 when he joined, Donald Trump has tweeted 58,700 times. Since 2010 when she joined, Neera Tanden has tweeted 87,500 times.

— Sam Seder (@SamSeder) November 29, 2020

FLASHBACK: Neera Tanden and her Center for American Progress pushed cuts to Social Security after the 2010 midterms.

New from @dailyposter: https://t.co/mhLxYvEmpe pic.twitter.com/monUoNSMie

— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) November 30, 2020

Walter Bragman's summary of Neera Tanden's position as laid out in the clip he links to omits so much context that it amounts to a deliberate distortion.

The election mattered a lot, primarily for the purpose of preventing another 4 years of Donald Trump. In that sense, mission accomplished. But it was really just triage, imo.

I just want to reiterate this -- as the possibility starts to recede into the rear-view, I think it's almost unfathomable how bad and how hard to come back from a second Trump term would have been, and in some sense because it's not going to happen it's going to be hard to appreciate what we escaped.

yes