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December 2nd, 2020 
Awake Goy Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden to be director of OMB, and Tanden is an experienced political operator with critics on the right and the left. A former aide to Hillary Clinton, Tanden heads an official Democratic Party thinktank, the Center for American Progress, and famously battled the Sanders wing of the party. Last night on the News Hour, her nomination was described as “radioactive” for Republicans because of her twitter activity over the years. Also that Tanden is a liberal on many issues: “climate change, health care, on.. running budget deficits to stoke growth.”
We have often written about Tanden in the last few years (never very nicely) because she has been such a good functionary for Israel inside the Democratic Party leadership. There’s no sense that Tanden really cares about Israel–only that this is the party line and she’s going to enforce it. Her advocacy shows how ensconced the Israel lobby is in the party, and how difficult it will be for Joe Biden to restart the Iran deal or do anything about Israeli settlements, if he has a mind to.
Tanden oversaw two controversies at the Center for American Progress that make the point.
In 2012, Israel supporters launched a smear campaign against Israel-critical writers at the Center for American Progress accusing them of antisemitism because they’d suggested that the lobby plays too large a role in US policy. The writings were as I recall fairly mild; one writer cracked that former Senator Mark Kirk was the Senator from AIPAC. Alan Dershowitz led the charge against these writers. And Tanden folded. The writings were scrubbed; and ultimately Ali Gharib, Eli Clifton and Matt Duss all left the thinktank.
Gharib revisited this on twitter Nov. 29 but said he wishes Tanden well:
She gave orders to censor ThinkProgress on Israel, so as not to raise the Israel lobby’s ire. It was a cowardly thing to do. I was one of those writers. It was a really shitty situation that her utter lack of leadership and moral courage only made worse.
That said, I don’t hate her and don’t think she’s evil and frankly I don’t think opposing her nom is a worthwhile pursuit for the Democratic Party’s left wing. I hope her enmity with the left (Bernie) becomes an unspoken backdrop in efforts to get firm commitments from her on governing principles (a willingness to run up deficits in this time). That would be useful.
More egregious, in November 2015, mere weeks after Benjamin Netanyahu had done all he could to upend the Democratic president’s Iran deal and failed, and a year after he’d slaughtered 500 children and many other civilians in Gaza, Tanden hosted the prime minister at the thinktank for a fawning interview.
This was, nakedly, an effort to embrace Israel and its lobby because Hillary Clinton was running for president– and doing everything she could to assuage major donors even as she supported the Iran deal.
Tanden bent over backwards not to offend the prime minister — “There are many areas… where we progressives can learn lessons from Israel,” she said. And her most critical question, asking about Netanyahu’s racist appeal to voters earlier that year, warning that “Arab voters were coming out in droves”— Tanden framed as, “one incident that really did strike a nerve with that many progressives.” When Tanden called for questions from the audience, all came from Israel lobbyists.
The following year, Wikileaks released emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee that showed that Tanden had reported to John Podesta, the head of CAP and later Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, on the Netanyahu event and said it had divided the staff but it “was worth it”, because CAP scored a big donor, and “we will never be called anti-Semitic again.”
Nothing we have done has pitted being a think tank and being ideologically action oriented against each other more harshly. At the end of the day, we had to choose….
Things gained: We will never be called anti-Semitic again. No matter what anyone writes…. we have definitely proven we’re a think tank. And it may have sealed the deal with a new board member.
Things lost: Staff is riven. On both sides.
A month later Tanden said they’d landed that board member, the pro-Israel donor Jonathan Lavine.
Again, the interesting thing here is that Tanden is a pure operator, and she knew her business, and that business was being pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian. The issue is not likely to come up at OMB, but her story reminds us of how important Israel support is inside the Democratic Party.
Progressives have made a lot of progress. It’s hard to imagine the racist prime minister being fawned over by any leading Democrat, given the work of Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib and others to advance the idea of Palestinian human rights. But if you think Joe Biden wants to spend political capital making progressive policy here, you have another think coming.
h/t James North.
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