The GOP campaign to sink Neera Tanden isn’t about ‘hypocrisy.’ It’s worse. By Greg Sargent

The GOP campaign to sink Neera Tanden isn’t about ‘hypocrisy.’ It’s worse. By Greg Sargent

Of all the claims we’ve heard about the GOP effort to torpedo Neera Tanden from serving as President Biden’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the weakest of all has been that Republicans are guilty of “hypocrisy.”

It’s true, of course, that Republicans who are opposing Tanden over her harsh social media attacks on them are being hypocritical. As has been widely noted, Republicans stood by while then-President Donald Trump heaped rage, ridicule, and outright abuse on Democrats for four straight years.

Democrats have been pointing this hypocrisy out fairly regularly. Here, for instance, is one such claim:

“Republicans are guilty of astounding hypocrisy, astounding hypocrisy,” former governor Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) said. “For them to complain about calling somebody names on Twitter — after they stood by and supported the president — is just pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.”

This kind of outrage seems to embody a sense that Republicans can be shamed into being consistent if only they are sufficiently reminded of their own previous conduct. If that happens, then maybe they’ll reconsider!

But this feels off — and even out of sync with the times — in a very fundamental way. It doesn’t reckon with the true depths of bad faith and perfidy that are really driving this.

No, this campaign against Tanden is part of a much broader project by Republicans, one that will continue long after Tanden’s fate is determined: creating all manner of fake ways to try to hoodwink the media into claiming Biden has reneged on his promise to try to unify the country.

This is driven home by a new report in The Post about Tanden’s fate. The report’s focus is on White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s efforts to advocate for Tanden.

But what’s more interesting for our purposes here is what the report says about how hard Tanden worked to win over GOP lawmakers. Tanden has engaged directly with 44 senators:

Tanden surprised skeptics by working hard to assuage the concerns of lawmakers. “She really did reach out to everyone and apologize, and busted her tail, and said all the right things,” one senior Democratic official said. “What’s happened is deeply sad in a lot of ways because she’s thrown herself into the work. She took time to really dig in and learn about Republican priorities and the work of OMB. Recognizing the challenge, I think she has done almost twice as much as other nominees.”

Nobody can read this and seriously conclude that Republicans actually believe what they’ve said about all this: that Biden’s desire to keep Tanden as OMB chief will imperil his ability to carry out his promise to work across the aisle and restore unity.

The point is the opposite: It’s to spread around a fog of confusion designed to deceive people about what Biden actually meant by his unity promise, and to use that deception to portray Biden as reneging on it.

Biden’s promise was not to water down his agenda endlessly in the quest for bipartisan support no matter what. It was to bring the country together by demonstrating that Trump’s many degradations — the contemptuous treatment of the opposition as illegitimate; the whipping up of supporters into hate and violence at fellow Americans who were transformed into the enemy; the dismissal of despised legal and electoral outcomes as inherently illegitimate — have no place in our liberal democracy.

This would also include an effort to work with the opposition in good faith as much as possible, provided they would do the same, but not to chase after their bad faith forever.

Republicans have snookered media outlets into allowing them alone to define what counts as a failure to reach out to them, thus allowing them to unilaterally dictate what counts as a leadership failure on Biden’s part. The battle over Tanden is just more of the same, and Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) who end up opposing her are just willfully enabling it.

Even more galling is that this is happening at exactly the moment when Republicans are making it clear that virtually every single one of them will vote against Biden’s broadly popular rescue package even as the country is mired in multiple severe crises. Yet somehow, the partisan battling of the moment is still being widely depicted as a failure that runs in only one direction — flowing exclusively from Biden’s failure to reach out to Republicans.

If Tanden does go down, Republicans will have won a scalp for this particular wall of bad faith. Their meta-narrative will become not just that Biden failed to get a nominee, but also that Republicans dealt Biden this defeat righteously, as an act of just retribution for Biden’s failure to make good on his promise to reach out to them. They will only be emboldened to run this play again.

Describing this whole display as “hypocrisy” doesn’t come close to doing it justice.

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