Elections have consequences, and President Biden won with every mandate to put monetary doves like Janet Yellen in the Treasury Department and Obama loyalists like Tony Blinken in the State Department. But as Donald Trump learned, even presidents cannot populate their Senate-approved circles with professional Twitter trolls, and Neera Tanden rightly became the first fatality of Biden’s Cabinet dreams.
It’s telling enough that the White House touted Tanden primarily on the basis of the fact that she would be the first Asian American to run the Office of Management and Budget (a far less impressive feat considering the fact that our first female vice president is also our first Indian American one) and that she survived thanks to government benefits after her father evidently left the family. Much less was made on the Left about the fact that the nominee to run federal management actually had a slew of problems demonstrating her utter incompetency at running any form of management.
Would Tanden champion her fellow women? Seeing as she outed a subordinate while she was the president of the Center for American Progress as retaliation for said victim coming forward, I’d assume not.
Does she view her race as anything more than a get-out-of-jail-free card to overcome her missteps? Again, given that she thought a legitimate solution to our ballooning budget was to earn payment from Libya, in return for us illegally bombing it, in the form of seizing its oil, I’d wager not.
And is she really a big-tent liberal open to a new foreign policy alignment? Well, she did punch Faiz Shakir, born to Pakistani American immigrants, after he had the audacity to question Hillary Clinton about the Iraq War.
Republicans or even centrists dreaming of reshaping Biden’s mandate to design foreign policy or monetary decrees best look to the midterm elections if they have any real goals. But keeping a keyboard warrior from degrading Biden’s Cabinet is a worthy cause, and that’s why the centrists won.
