[For almost every role so far, Biden has chosen someone more
progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official
under Obama. ] [[link removed]]

COMPARING BIDEN'S ADMINISTRATION PICKS TO OBAMA'S IS REVEALING  
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Ryan Grim
December 1, 2020
The Intercept
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_ For almost every role so far, Biden has chosen someone more
progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official
under Obama. _

Biden has named Cecelia Rouse as chair of the Council of Economic
Advisors,

 

FOR THE BERNIE 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’s 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.

In October 2008, Michael Froman emailed
[[link removed]] John Podesta, who
oversaw Obama’s transition, a list of Cabinet and personnel
suggestions directly from his Citigroup email account. Froman, who led
Obama’s transition in the winter of 2008-09, would go on to become
Obama’s U.S. trade representative, and his October recommendations
would prove far more prescient than his bank’s forecast on the
subprime lending market; nearly all of them landed where he suggested.

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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’s treasury secretary, who groomed a
generation of Wall Street operatives, including Froman as well as
Rubin’s Treasury Department successor, Larry Summers. Rubin spent
his post-government years at Citigroup, including as chair of the firm
as it ran aground, destined for a bailout.

Biden’s 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 investment firm
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.

(Left/Top) Profile of Neera Tanden, chief operating officer of the
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.Photo: Marvin Joseph/The
Washington Post/Getty Images; Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

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’s. And there are
exceptions. On national security and foreign policy, Biden has hewed
closer to Obama’s approach — and he has backtracked from Obama’s
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.

Start with chief of staff: swapping out Rahm Emanuel for Ron Klain
isn’t close. Where Emanuel was outwardly hostile to the party’s
progressive wing — “communists” who were “fucking retarded”
— Klain, while not himself a fire-breathing Sanders supporter, has
always been respectful to the party’s left flank. (He is also known
for a heightened level of organizational competence, a rather
important trait in a pandemic.) Biden’s alternative, his close
adviser Steve Ricchetti, a longtime corporate lobbyist, was passed
over for the job amid progressive opposition.

At the Treasury Department, Obama went with Summers protégé Tim
Geithner, and Wall Street was pushing Biden to pick Geithner protégé
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.

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’s
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’s 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
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Progressives have not given the Biden administration a pass on its
appointments simply because they’re not as tied to Wall Street as
Obama’s. As deputy treasury secretary, Obama chose financial
services executive Neal Wolin, who had been another protégé 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’s
sustainable development investing, which critics have called merely a
cover for dirty investment strategies.

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’t part of his support
base. Just as Klain isn’t 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
[[link removed]] 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. “Wally is extremely
effective and has relationships across all parts of the party,” said
Dan Geldon, himself a former Warren chief of staff. “That generally
doesn’t happen by chance, it happens through a lot of hard work and
listening over a long period of time.”

The difference at the Interior Department is also shaping up to be
stark:

Obama meanwhile tapped Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to be his interior
secretary. Salazar is one of the most powerful advocates
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the oil and gas industry in the West, and he oversaw a boom in
fracking.

At the Office of Management and Budget, where Biden tapped Tanden,
Obama went with Peter Orszag, a deficit hawk who consistently hemmed
in the party’s 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 
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Center for American Progress from the deficit-reduction project.
Biden’s alternative had been Bruce Reed, a deficit hawk so fierce
he’d have made Orszag look dovish.

The National Economic Council comparison is even starker. Obama’s
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 protégé, had been director of the Hamilton Project, which was
founded by Bob Rubin. Farrell, after working for Goldman Sachs,
was head
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the McKinsey Global Institute.

Biden’s head of the NEC, Deese, has progressive critics pointing to
his time
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BlackRock, but he also has progressive supporters (including
environmentalist Bill McKibben
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significant number, something Summers certainly neither claimed nor
cultivated.

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’s
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.

On the foreign policy and national security front, the differences are
slight. Where Sanders had pledged
[[link removed]] an end
to forever wars
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Biden is implementing
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Obama’s 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 Michèle Flournoy undersecretary of defense.
Post-administration, Flournoy and Blinken cashed in to create WestExec
Advisors, 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
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For national security adviser, Biden has selected Jake Sullivan, now
44, a wunderkind aide to Hillary Clinton, where Obama named Marine
Gen. James Jones. Dennis Blair was Obama’s first director of
national intelligence, where Biden has chosen Avril Haines
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who was the administration lawyer who advised on the kill list
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And Rahm Emanuel has yet to be ruled out for a Cabinet post.

Overall, Biden’s choices for most positions, from the perspective of
the more progressive wing of the party, aren’t necessarily good, but
they’re not as bad as Obama’s 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’t good enough.

_Become a member of The Intercept. As legal and security costs grow,
we depend on reader support. Support The Intercept's independent
journalism. [[link removed]]_

_Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief._

_He was previously the Washington bureau chief for HuffPost, where he
led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won
once. He edited and contributed reporting to
groundbreaking investigative project
[[link removed]] on
heroin treatment that not only changed federal and state laws, but
shifted the culture of the recovery industry. The story, by Jason
Cherkis, was a Pulitzer finalist and won a Polk Award._

_He grew up in rural Maryland. He has been a staff reporter for
Politico and the Washington City Paper and is a former contributor to
MSNBC. He is a contributor to the Young Turks Network and author of
the book “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement
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[email protected]  
@ryangrim_
 

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