An Early Snapshot of the Biden Presidency
As Biden forms his administration and prepares to take the reins of the country, he is already failing the activists who put him in office.
It is no secret that Biden was not an especially popular candidate on the American left. After decades of conservative policymaking, and crushing the candidacy of the left’s heavy favorite (with a little help from Obama), many young Democrats were not particularly excited about the prospect of a Biden presidency. But nevertheless, many young people and leftists groups around the country rallied behind the old-guard democrat, phone-banking and canvassing in droves to ensure that American democracy will hang on past the 2020 election. Unfortunately, yet not unexpectedly, before even taking office Biden has already made some outrageous decisions that should anger moderates and the left alike. So as of now, it looks like the time for celebration is over. It is once again time to fight for a better world, because Biden certainly isn’t going to do it for us.
Biden’s first failure came on November 30th, when he announced that he had nominated Neera Tanden for director of the US Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is the current president of the Center for American Progress, a “liberal” think tank based in Washington, D.C. On policy alone, Tanden is certainly terrible enough. She is one of the left’s most outspoken and influential critics online, making her disdain of Bernie Sanders and the movement well known on her twitter account. It may be hard to find receipts for that, however, because upon learning of her nomination she went back and deleted over 1,000 tweets. She busted a union at ThinkProgress, an arm of her Center for American Progress, by firing all of the workers who tried to organize it. And much like Biden, Neera Tanden has repeatedly called for Social Security cuts, sounding off deficit hawk talking points despite heading one of the most prominent “left-wing” think tanks in the country. Notably, since 2008, rumors have swirled that she allegedly punched Faiz Shakir, an editor at ThinkProgress who would later become Bernie’s campaign manager, over an interview question.
And yet, none of those actions hold even a candle to the worst of Neera Tanden. On April 23, 2018, Buzzfeed News, who originally broke the Steel Dossier and Kevin Spacey misconduct accusations, published a report describing a culture at the Center for American Progress that turned a blind eye to sexual harassment. In essence, a woman working at CAP filed an exit memo that “[detailed] the sexual harassment she experienced from Benton Strong, a manager on her team — harassment, she wrote, that management already knew about — and how she faced retaliation for reporting it.” The report revealed that multiple women had in fact experienced forms of harassment from Mr. Strong, yet months went by until Mr. Strong was reprimanded, and eventually was forced to leave CAP. Furthermore, CAP failed to warn Strong’s next employer, the mayor of Seattle, about the complaints. Throughout the process, Tanden was perceived as failing to lead and failing to act on such a pressing matter, which, coming from a “progressive”, was shocking.
Despite these already damning circumstances, Neera Tanden only seemed to handle it worse after the report was published. 2 days after their original report, Buzzfeed News published a second report that detailed what happened at a company-wide meeting after the first report. Tanden had called a meeting to ensure employees felt safe at the organization, which on its surface seems like a satisfactory course of action. Yet, employees were shocked when Tanden outted the anonymous victim who issued the complaint in front of the entire organization. As reported by Buzzfeed News, Tanden had “used [her] first name twice in quick succession and then paused.” Importantly, employees present at the meeting mentioned that her actions seemed unintentional, and she had apologized profusely afterwards both in person and over email correspondence. However, such a monumental fuck-up in an already tense situation is just not acceptable. As one CAP employee present at the meeting detailed in the Buzzfeed News report, Neera Tanden had “lost the organization” and that “the subtext of every question was a lack of confidence in her leadership and ability to create trust within the organization.”
These reports are, of course, public knowledge and out in the open. And yet despite her terrible policy history and horrible handling of sexual harassment allegations under her watch, Joe Biden chose to nominate her for an incredibly important position. This only leaves a few options for how the Biden team handled her nomination. On one hand, Biden’s vetting team may have failed to perform a 5 minute google search about Neera Tanden’s tenure at CAP, and how she let down every single employee under her with her “leadership”. On the other hand, the vetting team did see this information and rather than expressing doubt over the nomination, decided that this was all okay. Or, at the end of the day, Biden’s team did recommend against the nomination but Biden went ahead and nominated her anyway. I don’t know which one of the three is the worst, but I can tell you that regardless of the circumstances that led to it, Tanden’s nomination represents an absolute failing on the Biden team’s promise to “Protect and empower women around the world.”
Biden’s second major failing of the transition period doesn’t come from a nomination or appointment, but from himself. Ryan Grim, a reporter at the Intercept, obtained audio from an early-December virtual meeting that Biden and Harris had with various civil rights activists, including NAACP president Derrick Johnson and Reverend Al Sharpton. And on a good note, Biden was very receptive to discussing these topics with activists in the first place, acknowledging that “their job is to push me”, which he mentioned in a CNN interview before the meeting took place.
But, as Grim’s reporting revealed, Biden oftentimes spoke in anger towards the activists, as if their efforts were not the reason why he won in the first place. With no evidence, he claimed that the GOP used “defund the police” to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats. He also argued that he must be hesitant with executive orders concerning common sense gun control because he doesn’t want to “violate the constitution”. Notably, his policy website tells a much different story, which claims that “Joe Biden also knows how to make progress on reducing gun violence using executive action.”
While these comments are based on policy positions, Biden also strayed into some pretty concerning rhetorical territory, often sounding a bit Trump-ish. Ironic, certainly, because this is often a criticism levied at leftist politicians. When discussing a potential assault weapons ban, Biden proclaimed that “no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me. Me. But you can’t do it by executive order.” Of course, this language discounts the hard work of activists around the country and the activists in that very call. But it also conveniently leaves out that time when Biden voted to allow weapons to be sold via mail, and eventually the internet. Granted, Biden was the author of the original assault weapons ban, and he has certainly done a lot to advance gun control measures in America. But using that specific language matters, and the “me, I did that” language is antithetical to his message of unity, healing, and going at our nation’s problems together.
Unfortunately, the comments only get worse from here. When activists on the call mentioned that many people feel as though they have not seen enough progress, Biden turned angry, raised his voice, and said “let’s get something straight, you shouldn’t be disappointed,” reiterated his claim that he’s done more than anyone else, and claimed that “[he] was the only person to run on 3 platforms [he] was told could not win the election”. And, shockingly, claimed that no progressive was talking about Charlottesville, where in 2017, white supremacists marched through the streets and murdered a protestor. We can easily verify that that is a lie, of course.
This should outrage moderates who believed that the Bernie and Warren campaigns were too focused on the economy rather than issues of race. Biden’s record on race is shaky at best, disastrous at worst. As Kamala famously pointed out during a primary debate, Biden never supported federally mandated busing, lest we forget that his reasoning was because “[his]children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.” Biden also authored the 1994 crime bill, which is likely the single biggest contributor to the meteoric rise of mass-incarceration we see today. If Biden is to be a successful president, he needs to prove that he has moved past his racist rhetoric and policymaking. In that regard, the language he used in his call with activists did him no favors.
These failures should concern everyone in the Democratic Party, no matter where you fall on the economic spectrum. Neera Tanden made an unbelievably bad error in a tense sexual harassment case, that should be disqualifying. Biden nominated her anyway. Activists desperate for change pleaded with Biden to act decisively and with conviction. He shot them down with empty platitudes, shoddy claims about his own past achievements, and lies. In our current climate, we simply cannot have a President making avoidable errors that will surely piss off the activists that delivered him the presidency. If these failures continue, and build up over the next 4 years, Biden may find that the young people who “settled for Biden” in 2020 aren’t going to settle anymore.
