The point of politics is to keep its ugliness hidden, not out in open view.
The Biden administration has just announced that Neera Tanden, its pick to head the Office of Management and Budget, has withdrawn her nomination.
It’s frustrating to watch nearly every mainstream media outlet, including the AP and CBS News, paint this entire fracas as, essentially, a result of “cancel culture” over her many years’ worth of poisonous tweets. This is the sort of story that’s likely to bring eyeballs to websites.
It’s also the usual mendacity on the part of mainstream outlets desperate to get eyes to their sites. Conveniently hidden in all this “Neera Tanden Was Denied a Nomination Because of Past Tweets” myth is the fact that Tanden has been, during her entire benighted career so far, a toxic, money-grubbing politician and powerbroker without a shred of human decency and principle. Expanding on that story is too much work and not as sexy as the much simpler one about someone being cancelled over past tweets.
The completely verifiable and utterly horrifying stories about Tanden have been well known, even though the press seems bent on forgetting matters that transpired just a few years ago.
Let’s consider that she outed a victim of sexual harassment at the very organisation she headed, the Center for American Progress (CAP), to the shock of her employees.
Let’s consider that CAP was outed for its list of corporate donors. Even according to the very liberal, not left, New York Times,
The donors’ list includes a particularly large number of donations from the health care sector, including America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade association, as well as Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, CVS Caremark and Eli Lilly, the drug maker. The donations have come at a time when the organization has been a strong advocate of President Obama’s health insurance program.
As Nathan J. Robinson has pointed out, in a detailed piece you should read for more on Tanden and CAP, Tanden “advised the Clinton campaign against a $15 minimum wage, and in one disturbing instance, as Glenn Greenwald has reported, argued ‘that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.’”
Tanden should never have been put forward as a candidate: I suspect the nomination was payment for years of service rendered by someone who had proven herself willing to go to any lengths for her standard libdem friends. This is a woman who once punched Faiz Shakir for daring to question Hillary Clinton on her support for the Iraq war. Tanden’s defense? She didn’t punch him, she only pushed him. Well, then.
To be fair, punching someone is hardly a disqualification and in Tanden’s case, there’s a far worse decades-long history of being a toxic, malignant, power-hungry, money-grubber who sells out to corporations. Again, not exactly unusual for politicians and even, in some quarters, super-qualifications. But if we are to discuss what happened with the Tanden nomination, can we at least keep a grip on reality and not buy into the mainstream media story that she was forced to withdraw because of…her tweets?
The problem with Neera Tanden is not that she had to withdraw her nomination over her tweets: the problem is that her tweets only represented a lifetime of toxicity to everyone around her, even staff who depended on her discretion, and a willingness to burn everything and everyone who stood in her way and to be bought out by moneyed interests. Neera Tanden’s problem is not that she is a horrible, manipulative pile of toxic sludge but that she forgot, as she coasted upwards on the tailcoats of her far more influential friends, that the point of politics is to keep its ugliness hidden, not out in open view.
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