{"id":736,"date":"2020-12-01T20:26:57","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T20:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=130266"},"modified":"2020-12-01T20:26:57","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T20:26:57","slug":"comparing-bidens-administration-picks-to-obamas-reveals-a-stark-shift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/01\/comparing-bidens-administration-picks-to-obamas-reveals-a-stark-shift\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing Biden\u2019s Administration Picks to Obama\u2019s Reveals a Stark Shift"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the Bernie<\/u> Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, the Joe Biden presidential transition is what losing looks like. It is also, for better or for worse, what incremental progress looks like. Whether it\u2019s enough to match the scale of the overlapping crises or to stave off a midterm wipeout remains to be seen, but a comparison to the transition of President Barack Obama reveals the distance the party has traveled over the past 12 years.<\/p>\n

In October 2008, Michael Froman emailed John Podesta<\/a>, who oversaw Obama\u2019s transition, a list of cabinet and personnel suggestions directly from his Citigroup email account. Froman, who led Obama\u2019s transition in the winter of 2008 and 2009, would go on to become Obama\u2019s U.S. Trade Representative, and his October recommendations would prove far more prescient than his bank\u2019s forecast on the subprime lending market; nearly all of them landed where he suggested.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Froman was part of the Rubinite wing of the Democratic Party, named for Bob Rubin, a longtime Goldman Sachs executive who served as President Bill Clinton\u2019s treasury secretary, grooming a generation of Wall Street operatives, including Froman as well as Rubin\u2019s successor at the helm of the Treasury, Larry Summers. Rubin spent his post government years at Citigroup, including as chairman of the firm as it ran aground, destined for a bailout.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s version of the transition has raised howls for some of his picks, including Neera Tanden, the controversial head of the Center for American Progress, and Brian Deese, whose time at Blackrock has drawn opposition from some climate activists. But in almost every spot so far named, Biden has chosen a person more progressive and less entrenched with Wall Street than the official who held the same position in 2009 under Obama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"President<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

(Left\/Top) Profile of Neera Tanden, Chief Operating Officer of Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 31, 2011. (Right\/Bottom) Brian Deese, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, speaks in the White House briefing room in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 2012.<\/span>Photo: Marvin Joseph\/The Washington Post\/Getty Images; Andrew Harrer\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The comparison exercise may do more to reveal the weakness of the early Obama administration, and its reliance on the Rubin wing of the party, than to testify to the strength of Biden\u2019s. And there are exceptions. On national security and foreign policy, Biden has hewed closer to Obama\u2019s approach \u2014 and he has backtracked from Obama\u2019s vow to bar lobbyists from his administration, putting an Apple lobbyist on his VP vetting committee. But Biden, when faced with choices so far, has at least made the least bad one on the table, especially when it comes to economic policy.<\/p>\n

Start with chief of staff: swapping out Rahm Emanuel for Ron Klain isn\u2019t close. Where Emanuel was outwardly hostile to the party\u2019s progressive wing \u2014 \u201ccommunists\u201d who were \u201cfucking retarded\u201d \u2014 Klain, while not himself a fire-breathing Sanders supporter, has always been respectful to the party\u2019s left flank. (He is also known for a heightened level of organizational competence, a rather important trait in a pandemic.) Biden\u2019s alternative, his close adviser Steve Ricchetti, a longtime corporate lobbyist, was passed over for the job amid progressive opposition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the Treasury Department, Obama went with Summers prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Tim Geithner, and Wall Street was pushing Biden to pick Geithner prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Lael Brainard. Instead, Biden tapped Janet Yellen, the former Fed chair, a center-left economist with a mixed record, but one who has dedicated her academic career to understanding how to achieve the fullest possible employment.<\/p>\n

That Biden is staffing his White House with fewer ghouls than his former boss is a function of both internal and external factors. The party broadly has shifted left, with ideas like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal gaining serious traction. Biden, who has consistently positioned himself in the center of the party, whichever direction the party went, has moved with it, as evidenced by the progressive drift of his presidential platforms from 1988 to 2008 to 2020. But it also involved a long-running research and advocacy campaign that sprang up as a reaction to the failure of the left to influence Obama\u2019s transition on personnel. The Revolving Door Project, helmed by Jeff Hauser, a former AFL-CIO official, was built to influence a Hillary Clinton administration, and has worked in collaboration with the group Demand Progress, which has similarly focused on the importance of personnel as policy. Clinton\u2019s loss gave the outfits an extra four years to continue compiling research documents on dozens of potential Democratic appointees. Just on Tuesday, RDP was featured in both the New York Times<\/a> and Politico<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Wally<\/p>\n

Wally Adeyemo, nominated to serve as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, speaks at The Queen theater, on Dec. 1, 2020, in Wilmington, Del.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Andrew Harnik\/AP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Progressives have not given the Biden administration a pass on its appointments simply because they\u2019re not as tied to Wall Street as Obama\u2019s. As deputy treasury secretary, Obama chose financial services executive Neil Wolin, who had been another prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to Summers during the Clinton administration. Biden went with Wally Adeyemo. The strike against Adeyemo is his recent time working for the financial titan Blackrock, where he served as chief of staff to CEO Larry Fink, a mark also held against Deese, who led the firm\u2019s sustainable development investing, which critics have called merely a cover for dirty investment strategies.<\/p>\n

The move from Wolin to Adeyemo is similar to going from Emanuel to Klain. Wolin, a creature of Wall Street, had no interest in the views of the progressive community, as they weren\u2019t part of his base of support. Just as Klain isn\u2019t a card-carrying progressive but hears out that perspective, the same is true of Adeyemo. When Elizabeth Warren was given the job of standing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, Adeyemo was foisted on her by Geithner as a chief of staff, but the two quickly developed a strong working relationship. Born in Nigeria, Adeyemo attended a poor public high school in Los Angeles before rising to where he is now. Along the way, he joined the board of Demos, a progressive economic think tank, and not a home for Rubinites. \u201cWally is extremely effective and has relationships across all parts of the party,\u201d said Dan Geldon, himself a former Warren chief of staff. \u201cThat generally doesn\u2019t happen by chance, it happens through a lot of hard work and listening over a long period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference at the Interior Department is also shaping up to be stark.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Obama meanwhile tapped Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to be his Interior Secretary. Salazar is one of the most powerful advocates of the oil and gas industry in the west<\/a>, and oversaw a boom in fracking.<\/p>\n

At OMB, where Biden tapped Tanden, Obama went with Peter Orszag, a deficit hawk who  consistently hemmed in the party\u2019s ambitions, before departing for a job at Citigroup. Tanden, while the Obama administration was still pursuing a reckless Grand Bargain with Republicans aimed at deficit reduction, publicly distanced the Center for American Progress <\/a>from the deficit-reduction project. Biden\u2019s alternative had been Bruce Reed, a deficit hawk so fierce he\u2019d have made Orszag look dovish.<\/p>\n

The National Economic Council comparison is even starker. The head of the NEC was Summers himself. His deputies were Jason Furman and Diana Farrell. Furman, an alum of the Clinton administration and a Rubin protege, had been director of the Hamilton Project, which was founded by Bob Rubin. Farrell, after working for Goldman Sachs, was head of the McKinsey Global Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s head of the NEC, Deese, has progressive critics linked to his time at Blackrock<\/a>, but he also has progressive supporters (including environmentalist Bill McKibben<\/a>) in significant number, something Summers certainly neither claimed nor cultivated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Cecilia<\/div>\n
\"US-ECONOMY-FINANCE-IMF-WB-ROMER\"<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

(Left\/top) Council of Economic Advisers member-designate, Cecilia Rouse testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Jan. 15, 2009. (Right\/bottom) Christina Romer speaks at the Challenges of Job-Rich and Inclusive Growth at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on October 8, 2014.<\/span>Photo: Jose Luis Magana\/AP; Nicholas Kamm\/Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Biden has named Cecilia Rouse as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, a position held first in the Obama administration by Christina Romer, a progressive economist who was routinely overruled by the men on the economic team. Rouse served on the National Economic Council at the end of the Clinton administration and on the CEA during the Obama administration. In a twist of history, the NEC itself was created specifically as a vehicle for Rubin to build a power center that would undermine the CEA. Her deputies on the CEA, meanwhile, are Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, both progressive labor economists. In the Obama administration, Bernstein served as Biden\u2019s economic adviser, and was known as the only voice on economics progressive could consistently rely on, though his position with the vice president excluded him from real influence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the foreign policy and national security front, the differences are slight. Where Sanders had pledged an end to forever wars, Biden is implementing a restoration <\/a>of Obama\u2019s approach in many ways. Where Obama named Hillary Clinton secretary of state, Biden turned to his longtime aide Tony Blinken. At the Pentagon, Obama kept in place Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and named Michelle Flournoy Undersecretary of Defense. Post-administration, Flournoy and Blinken cashed in to create WestExec Advisers, a lucrative strategic consulting firm that helped tech companies win Pentagon contracts. Flournoy is the frontrunner for Defense Secretary, though Biden may be having second thoughts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For national security adviser, Biden has selected Jake Sullivan, now 43, a wunderkind aide to Hillary Clinton, where Obama named Marine Gen. James Jones. Dennis Blair was Obama\u2019s first director of national intelligence, where Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who was the administration lawyer who advised on the kill list.<\/p>\n

And Rahm Emanuel has yet to be ruled out for a Cabinet post.<\/p>\n

But overall, Biden\u2019s choices for most positions, from the perspective of the more progressive wing of the party, aren\u2019t necessarily good, but they\u2019re not as bad as Obama\u2019s, either. Still, with millions facing eviction and destitution, and just a decade to turn the global economy around to avert a climate apocalypse, better isn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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