Biden’s cabinet is ‘delightfully boring’. Can the United States, confused by reality TV, deal with that?

OPINION: Probably not surprising for a nation addicted to reality TV like High school or The voice (or the fourth season of “House of Trump”), but a popular online sport, while Joe Biden built an advantage in the 2020 White House polls, he speculated on which top Democratic political celebrities would take his cabinet seats.

Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Treasury! Senator Bernie Sanders for Labor! Barack Obama’s top aide Susan Rice for the state! Oprah for the trade! … Okay, I made that last rumor, but who wouldn’t want to wear the brilliance of a new administration, undoing the stain of the Trump years?

Instead, the president-elect’s first batch of hires has sent even the most die-hard political junkies to the Google or Wikipedia machine.

Biden’s highest-profile nomination, Antony Blinken to head the State Department, where he was a senior MP under Obama, was popular with DC insiders even though he’s unknown to the average voter, while names like Alejandro Mayorkas for Homeland Security or Avril Haines for Director of National Intelligence, no matter how qualified, is even darker.

The best-known choice so far (aside from former Secretary of State and presidential candidate John Kerry for the newly created post of climate envoy) is former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen at the Treasury, though the 74-year-old economist doesn’t have much of it. of an integrated electorate, unlike Warren, a progressive fighter for consumers and workers.

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Brendan Buck, a former senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill, called the Democrat’s first batch of picks “so delightfully boring” (intended as a compliment), while veteran Beltway expert John F Harris on Politico wrote an article on “Biden’s careerists.” @, writing that the incoming POTUS and University of Delaware alumnus has a crush on “the Washington professional with impeccable credentials from elite institutions.”

There’s a perfect storm of reasons why Biden is rejecting the pizazz of a Warren or a Rice, well known to Sunday TV news junkies, for the likes of Blinken and Mayorkas that thwart facial recognition. The biggest, in my opinion, is a wise political gamble on the part of Team Biden: That smart, boring, anonymous one is exactly what nearly 80 million Americans voted for this fall. Call it, cynically, a return to brunch without political upheaval for the new Democratic base of college-educated suburbanites, or call it a rejection of Donald Trump’s nonstop vulgar circus, but most of “Resistance Twitter” is in love with Big Dull.

When I commented on Twitter at the start of Thanksgiving week that the safest route to Biden’s cabinet was to be an “unknown, qualified, boring, and uncontroversial undersecretary under Barack Obama,” I received a flood of tsk- responses. tsk-ing for hinting that “boring” was a bad thing.

“As long as they know how to do their job with skill, honesty and decency, they can remain as unknown as they wish,” wrote one, while another added (and I agree with this), “Given what we’ve just done to the end, I’ll take it boring, as long as I’m competent.

No one personifies this more than Biden’s first hire, his incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, who oversaw the Obama administration’s widely praised response to the Ebola threat in 2014 and brings that air of security to the fight against coronavirus.

And some of the president-elect’s choices are not so well known that they could now become rising stars, most notably Blinken, who wowed viewers of Tuesday’s press conference with the dramatic story of his 1945 Polish stepfather’s rescue from a Nazi concentration camp by a black American soldier, and how that shaped his family’s vision of America.

The same goes for her ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has spoken poignantly of witnessing the KKK’s cross-burn as a black girl growing up in segregated Louisiana and will now be the face of the nation on a global stage.

One can’t help but notice that Biden’s cabinet is remarkably diverse, with an important role for women, after four years of a slave president of white dudes named Steve.

They believe in the previously uncontroversial idea that the United States should work with its traditional allies rather than insult them. After almost 48 months of nonstop chaos, they are ready to go to work from day one. Like his boss, all of the new president’s men and women are political tightrope walkers, personified by Yellen, who balances a surprisingly progressive view of climate change with a tough, conservative view of deficits that alarms progressives.

But the most important thing about Biden’s cabinet is this: He’s choosing anonymous competition not just because he wants to, but because he has to.

In fact, if Biden is a high-level political act, then getting his cabinet through a Washington that hasn’t been so divided since 1861 is like crossing the Grand Canyon.

The president-elect cannot risk losing the support of the left which was arguably the difference between Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss of the states on the battlefield in 2016 and Biden narrowly winning them.

But the names that would make the progressive movement more hijacked, especially Sanders and Warren, probably couldn’t be confirmed in such a toxic environment and (without getting into the complexities) would also give Democrats a weaker hand in the Senate.

Right now, the flukes and flaws of America’s fragile balkanized democracy have put any bold action on hold, including controversial cabinet elections, until Georgia holds its two Senate elections, which will decide who leads the chamber. , On January 5. Definitely. The Biden team is concerned that appointing someone like Sanders with his background as a socialist would be a boon to the GOP television ad creators, while someone like Rice, who is admired and has a long relationship with the president-elect – would have sparked weeks of ridiculous and divisive Republican hearings on Benghazi.

Biden’s plan to deal with the left so far has not been to elect any real progressives, but rather people with a reputation for at least listening to progressives.

For example, Sanders’ foreign policy guru Matt Duss praised Blinken, calling it “a great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with the progressive rank and file.” But this détente is fragile and could explode if Biden finds an important job for his former friend in the Obama administration and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, seen as a roadblock for his role in covering up the police murder of Laquan McDonald.

But the real threat is that a Senate led by Mitch McConnell, if the Republican Party sticks to those two Georgia seats, will put Biden’s nominees, no matter how seemingly uncontroversial, go through hell and likely block confirmation of some, if not many.

Just because there are no obvious red flags with a Blinken or a Thomas-Greenfield doesn’t mean a 2024 Republican like Sen. Marco Rubio doesn’t criticize them as people who “went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend. to all the right conferences (and) they will be courteous (and) orderly caretakers of America’s decline. “

In the coming weeks, Biden’s mimosa-powered suburban base may be surprised to learn just how much, for some 73 million angry Americans and their political vicissitudes, a seasoned resume means “deep state” or even “Satanist” to the crowd of people. QAnon, respecting America’s long-standing alliances means “globalist” and the Ivy League means “elitists” who are sure to look down on the “deplorable” workers who voted for Trump.

The 46th president of the United States is throwing a boring competition hand grenade into a free-fire political zone.

Blinken, Mayorkas and Haines may be strangers, but we know that people like them have been the fuel for a global fire of right-wing populism that gave us four years of Trump, and is eager to reignite.

There is an underlying assumption in Biden’s strategy that a medium that is now too caffeinated with conflict, and a political right that can draw false political outrage from the chaff, can somehow return to a pre-2015 state of calm. , or maybe before 1985..

In the end, Joe Biden’s “delightfully boring” cabinet and White House staff may not make much of a difference to a press and audience confused by reality TV shows that mostly lie when they say they want to be bored.

– The Philadelphia Inquirer