A Kinder, Unified America?

If President Joe Biden believes Americans are better than “the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured,” as he said in his first speech as president, why did he nominate Neera Tanden to head the Office Management and Budget?

Her Twitter poison pen was the Democrats’ answer to Donald Trump. If this is Biden’s idea of unity how would he describe annihilation? Given her name-calling actions of the past, and assuming words have meaning, this person should have never been put forward.

On the other hand, she fills a few of the right boxes Democrats seem to think are more important than qualifications. First, Tanden is a female. The Biden White House can never have too many women in it. Second, she is a person of color. The boring white guy from Delaware can always use a little color.

Tanden heads a left-of-center “institute,” the Center for American Progress. It is a retread of Lyndon Johnson’s failed attempt to create a substantial trade-off between government spending on defense and social programs. The CAP was created in 2003 as the left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, according to influencewatch.org.

CAP claims it is progressive. Its attacks on conservatives and Republicans might affirm this. However, progressive Democrats are familiar with Tanden’s personal threats against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his leftist supporters.

CAP was founded by John Podesta is a Democratic apparatus who has served as Chief of Staff in the Clinton administration, Counselor to the President in the Obama administration and chair of the Hillary Clinton 2016 Presidential campaign. He is also the co-founder and former president of CAP with Paul Begala in 2003. Begala has said Podesta “believes in and uses power in a way that many Democrats are too pusillanimous to do… ruthlessly if necessary.”

This is where Tanden comes from; it doesn’t sound like a peacemaker or unifier.

In his first speech as president, Joe Biden emphasized unity, situating his inauguration among other tense moments in American history where democracy prevailed despite the country’s divisions and crises.

If Biden believed his rhetoric, why would he fly in an extremist like Tanden to head a government agency? Why not appoint Hillary Clinton, who raised Tanden politically?