Democratic (Party) Direction

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

Apparently some 80 million Americans had some inkling of how bad a second Trump term would have been. You don't get that kind of participation in a 'normal' presidential election. Compared to most of the past century, the turnout this time was nothing less than gobsmacking. And that was in the midst of a deadly pandemic fer chrissake.

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.

She literally says "we need to put entitlements on the table."

xp Just imagine if we had national automatic mail-in voting...

Trump got the second most votes in history so probably roughly the same, percentage wise.

it was a double wave election definitely, but it mattered more to our side

Yes, and we should feel good about it.

I felt a little bit good about it for about an hour, but “it” was ruining the day of some maga freaks. I think that was plenty, especially considering Susan Collins’ roach-like survival on the same day, among other failures.

She literally says "we need to put entitlements on the table."

Yes. She literally said that. She literally says "we need to put entitlements on the table" within a lot of context that is consciously omitted in Bragman's description. Which is why anyone who only read the tweet and did not watch the clip would get a distorted idea of what the clip contains. I suspect Bragman knows not everyone will watch the clip.

The major context he omits is that she was dutifully falling in line behind a major initiative of the Obama administration, not just pushing entitlement cuts in a vacuum. And that initiative contained many major elements other than entitlement 'reform' and these were packaged as a Grand Bargain compromise.

My point is not that Obama's Grand Bargain was a good idea, because it wasn't. Rather my point is that distortion by careful omission of pertinent context is still distortion and repeating it just contributes to the noise, not to clarity.

I feel more good about our city council telling the mayor to go fuck herself during the budget cycle though! Much more good.

The major context he omits is that she was dutifully falling in line behind a major initiative of the Obama administration, not just pushing entitlement cuts in a vacuum.

You did not just trot out ‘just following orders.’

As Joe Biden would say, “come on, Jack.”

It’s not distortion or omission to say she championed entitlement “””reform.””” It’s right there on tape. That she was just following Obama’s shit lead doesn’t change reality.

She’s a grown ass woman with plenty of money, if she didn’t support cuts to Social Security and Medicare, she could have said that.

You did not just trot out ‘just following orders.’

No. I didn't. But you did.

I cannot think you aren't entirely aware that this construction contains echoes of the Nuremberg Trials and by suggestion, pulls in the whisper of Nazism and war crimes into a discussion of Neera Tanden's politics. Are you just a 'natural' at this method of argumentation, or did you have to study and sweat to achieve it?

Yes, that's it. I was calling her a Nazi. Much like saying one would follow others off a cliff - a situation where you are, in absolute fact, saying that they are a human-sized lemming.

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.

she deleted one of them today:

https://i.imgur.com/1HTwXaA.jpg

Number one cost-saving measure is going to be having every agency's twitter account staffed exclusively by Neera between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) November 30, 2020

Walker Bragman, Smart Political Thinking Man

hiring Neera Tanden isn’t anything other than a Fuck You to the Left/ Berniecrats.

Who, again, I’m willing to bet turned out better for Joe than the “embarrassed” Republicans they spent the entire campaign courting.

they don’t ‘have’ to do this. Neera isn’t some magical operator in DC. She’s just another asshole. get an asshole who doesn’t want to cut social security ffs how is this hard.