Photograph Source: US Department of Labor – Public Domain
It’s hard for me to write about Neera Tanden. Primarily because I cannot stand her smug face, her grating voice, or her haughty demeanor.
Still, I’ll try to put those physical prejudices aside and focus solely on Neera in her professional capacity as a perpetually employed defender of the Democratic Party’s corporate-driven status quo. For it is there, on both a moral and ethical level, where Neera Tanden is a singularly repulsive human being.
What does Neera Tanden stand for? As President and CEO of the Center for American Progress, Neera stands for money. She makes her money placating those who have it while pretending she cares about those who don’t. Her soul is not simply monetized, it’s tattooed with a dollar sign.
When crafting a policy proposal on food or housing or medicine, all that matters for Neera is how wealthy donors will react to it. The rest of us, she cons. Yet, in appreciation of her singular political focus, we are blithely expected to shut up and cope harder – thanking the Democratic Party at the ballot box for remaining loyal to unfettered capitalism as we shoplift a pill cutter and a package of ground beef.
Neera’s bottom line is, of course, encased in jargon. Neera will spew tactics and strategy. She will bray about the common sense intersectionality of oligarch and worker. Of the beneficial synergy between profit and dignity. Of a Democratic Party where anyone can have access to a meaningful life or, at minimum, know someone who does.
If you read those sentences carefully, you’ll see they intend nothing. There’s a simple reason for that. Neera, at her core, intends nothing… apart from the check clearing and you not knowing from whom she banked it.
Don’t misunderstand. I am not writing from the perspective of a rival consultant envious of Tanden’s client list. What’s more, I am not seeking to make a name for myself by burning bridges within the Democratic Party.
There is no element of the opinion making apparatus of the Democratic Party that would let me anywhere near the bridge! Like Santino Corleone, I’d be executed at the toll booth.
In truth, I did have some contact with a recent West Coast campaign and pitched a few ideas to a highly placed advisor who very patiently explained that they preferred approaches which were more “nuanced”. I don’t do nuance. So unless Eugene Debs and Danton set up a think tank, you’ll find me here at Substack seeking $50 a year subscriptions. {Which, incidentally, would be much appreciated!}
Yet the hardest thing about trying to take on Neera Tanden is that you are, in essence, taking on the Clinton mindset. Clintonites have long since gone from a cottage industry within the Democratic Party to its most debilitating contaminant. Clintonites don’t accept responsibility, they assign it. They function by blurring lines and conflating issues. And Neera has been viciously running the Bill & Hillary playbook of invective in lieu of policy since 2016.
Back then, Neera portrayed anyone more concerned with Glass-Steagall than the glass ceiling as being opposed to Hillary’s vagina, not her Goldman Sachs-centric vision. Bernie’s movement of the diverse, displaced and disaffected was proclaimed irredeemably sexist. And, as such, inferior to the candidate of Walmart, Wall Street and War’s ever-constricting definition of the politically possible.
Today, in Maine and Michigan, innuendo oozing from her every pore, Neera is at it again.
Neera, you see, has heard troubling things. Not just about the chastened Graham Platner but about his advisors. Did you know Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has the same advisors!? Supporters need to be wary. Voters need to be vigilant. Oh if only there was a place where uninformed citizens could hear the unfiltered though fully purchased opinions of Neera Tanden!
Disusefully… there are many. Neera has enthusiastic enablers in corporate media. She can be found on all the “news” shows. She will have a panel seat and a microphone and there will be a mug emblazoned “CNN” or MEET THE PRESS” or “THIS WEEK”. And when Neera Tanden is finished lying, she will be thanked for her part in a great conversation.
For decades, corporate Democrats have embraced identity politics for much the same reasons corporate media does. It’s an effortless way to identify inertia as movement. It allows a reassuringly defined electoral world where Kamala Harris is Shirley Chisholm. A world where elections are not lost due to blithering timidity, but because ungrateful fools are too racist and sexist to appreciate the best-we-can-expect-from-our-donor-base half measures at which Neera and her Center for Incremental Progress excel.
Unfortunately for Neera, issues of class and political economy are becoming impossible to insult away as zany, unworkable, and pie in the sky. More and more people are seeing the Democratic Socialists of America not as vile but viable.
Needless to say, Neera and fellow Clintonites like Matt Bennett at Third Way are apoplectic that cash and duplicitousness may not carry the day. In fact, Bennett became unhinged enough to break a cardinal rule of politics and speak the absolute truth: “They don’t give a rat’s a– about the Democratic Party in its current form, and they’re trying to change it,” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at moderate think tank Third Way, told The Hill. “We’re trying to stop them.”
Those are the political sides right now. Democratic Socialists and the possibility of a better country on one… Neera Tanden on the other. No decent person should need Pete Seeger to figure this out.
The post The Repulsiveness of Neera Tanden appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jerry Long.