President Joe Biden’s national security adviser [Jake Sullivan], said in a post-election interview: “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.”
[...]
There is no way to cleave the policy of the next decade from the outcome of the next election. If you lose power, your carefully constructed set of bills and international alliances can be turned to cinder by your successor. If it is true that Biden believed he was choosing the politics of posterity over the policies Americans would feel before the election, then he chose wrong.
[...]
The 2021 infrastructure law was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. [...]Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. That includes Sullivan, who described his experience as “profoundly radicalizing.”
[...]
"“Part of it is laws and regulations. Part of it is the self-deterrence of caution. Part of it is litigation. Part of it is complacency. Part of it is bureaucracy. But what I encountered in my four years as national security adviser was a constant and growing set of obstacles to getting anything done fast. It was a huge frustration. Huge.”
[...]
Our environmental laws use reviews and lawsuits to force the federal government to slow down and thoroughly consider all the possible consequences of its actions; our regulatory processes use notice-and-comment periods and create space for challenges to make sure voices can be heard; our local governments create space and time for residents to challenge the construction of housing in their communities until it conforms to their standards; Congress builds in complex planning procedures and review requirements to ensure taxpayer money is not lost to waste or fraud or abuse.
And Trump/Musk take a chainsaw to government and worry about it later. Or not at all.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare program into law on July 30, 1965; it began covering seniors a year later, on July 1, 1966. Compare that with the Biden administration’s Medicare reforms. In 2022, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration gave Medicare the authority to bargain down prices on 10 drugs; those prices won’t go into effect until … 2026. As Mike Konczal, a former economic adviser to President Biden, noted, that is “just in time for President Trump to take credit for them going into the midterms.”
[...]
Speed connects voters with the consequences of their votes. To survive, liberal democracy does not just need to deliver; it needs to deliver fast enough that voters know who to thank — or blame — for what they’re getting.
[...]
he reasoning Republicans gave for those complex requirements was that they feared waste and overspending. This is a common way Republicans gum up the government: by making it waste dollars and time in lengthy paperwork processes in which it tries to prove it will not waste dollars or time.
[...]
Representative Josh Harder, a California Democrat, told me [...] “We see this with costs. All of these projects are just going to cost way more money. But politically it has a huge cost as well. It breeds the cynicism and apathy that, to me, really characterizes our politics today. Getting something done quickly that addresses at least a little bit of the problem is better than spending years designing the perfect solution that never actually happens.”
[...]
“We had too much legacy and too little immediacy in our policy approach,” [Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden,] told me. “Look at everything after the American Rescue Plan — infrastructure, CHIPS, I.R.A. — all of it was long-term focused. The most off-the-charts popular thing we did was cap out-of-pocket costs on Medicare prescription drugs. We passed that in 2022, and it went into effect in 2025!"
[...]
This came to a particular head in the Biden administration because it, much more so than the Obama or first Trump administration, was trying to build real things in the real world — infrastructure, solar and wind farms, battery manufacturing plants, semiconductor fabs, and much more. As hard as it is to change Medicare rules, it is far harder to build interstate transmission lines.
[...]
But it’s not as if the Biden administration tried to change [obstructive] laws and failed. It never tried. Biden never gave a speech saying what his top staff members now say to me so freely. His administration never released a proposal for how to rewrite the laws and rebuild the state to accomplish its goals. Maybe the next Democratic administration will.
If we get one. Also, I doubt it. Democrats are plodders. Unless we get AOC or Chris Murphy in positions of power.
One of Hillary's loyal ass-kissers, Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, has just been exposed by another batch of Wikileaks emails.
Here's Twatwaffle Tanden - and horrible public speaker (somewhat reminiscent of Hillary herself) - sucking up for a future position in a Hillary administration - her public rhetoric:
Here's Tanden privately:
“Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should,” Tanden wrote in one September 2015 email. “Apologies are like her Achilles heel.”
[...]
Tanden observed in the email to Podesta that “she didn't seem like a b---- in the interview” and that she would “get to a full apology in a few interviews.”
In another August 2015 email, Tanden offered this particularly tough criticism of Clinton’s handling of the email scandal.
“…[Her] inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty.)”
In January 2016, after the delivery of an apparently well-crafted tweet by Podesta, the campaign chairman complained to Tanden that he wanted to tweet it earlier, but it was held up.
“Got held by who? Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal,” Tanden responded.
Somehow, I don't think she's going to make it to a Clinton administration position. Maybe she won't be alone. I'm looking at you, John Podesta.
Clinton’s description of herself as a moderate Democrat at a September 2015 event in Ohio causes some uproar amongst her team. In a mail from adviser Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, to Podesta in the days following the comment she asks why she said this.
“I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn't remember saying it. Not sure I believe her,” Podesta replies. Tanden insists that the comment has made her job more difficult after “telling every reporter I know she's actually progressive”.
“It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment,” she adds.
[...]
A May 2015 email between Podesta and Tanden appears to imply Clinton’s brothers are a source of embarrassment for the campaign.
In an email titled, ‘Glad you said no’ Tanden writes, “When H asked us to hire her old friend,” and Podesta replies, “Yup. Maybe we can rent the Queen Mary for the next 18 months and fill it with her brothers and assorted crazy hangers on sail around and around.”
They should know better. They know how vindictive Hillary is.
Maybe we shouldn't leave out Jake Sullivan.
Emails between Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan and Tanden from March 2016 discussed how it was “REALLY dicey territory” for Clinton to comment on strengthening “bribery laws to ensure that politicians don’t change legislation for political donations.”
Tanden agrees with Sullivan, “She may be so tainted she's really vulnerable = if so, maybe a message of I've seen how this sausage is made, it needs to stop, I'm going to stop it will actually work.”
Keep making that sausage guys. And get better email security.
If Neera gets the end of Hillary's boot, it couldn't happen to a moredeservingperson.
