Neera Tanden Is Not A Friend To Progressives, Which Can Be Seen From Her Smear Campaigns Against Bernie

By: Sammy Quarrato

Neera Tanden’s tweets destroyed her pathway to becoming OMB Director. Credit: nytimes.com

President Biden has been getting his cabinet nominations through the Senate, at this moment they have all passed successfully.

However, the President of the Center for American Progress, confirmed that in order to get Neera Tanden for the Director of Management and Budget it would be a challenge for a variety of reasons.

The progressive-wing of the Democratic Party despite what mainstream media was stating is not viewed favorably by progressives due to her hostility of members in government like Senator Bernie Sanders.

She also insulted multiple Republicans such as Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Mitch McConnell. She had stated about the former that ‘Vampires had more heart than Ted Cruz’ and the ladder as a resemblance to ‘Voldemort’.

This was specifically brought up in hearings, when Senator John Kennedy bluntly told her that, “You called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut”.

This eventually got to a point where Senators Joe Manchin, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and others stated that they would not vote for Neera Tanden due to her past behavior which makes it impossible to be confirmed for the position.

There is truth to what Senator Kennedy said, she has been hypercritical of Sanders and his campaign in the past, tweeting posts stating that Sanders’ campaign was hurting the Democratic Party and political system as a whole with how money in politics works.

Neera Tanden tweeted that Bernie Sanders’ campaign was destroying the Democratic Party and was helping Trump by pointing out how corrupting this system could be with money in politics.

It was incredibly common for her to get into Twitter fights before being nominated and it was revealed that she tweeted about 30,000 more tweets than Former President Trump.

Many more of these tweets and other actions/comments she made highlight just how much of an enemy she is to the progressive-wing of the Democratic Party.

She once said in a leaked email to Faiz Shakir who was chief editor for ThinkProgress on the subject of Libya, “We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil.”

What she shows in these two sentences alone are that she’s highly interventionist, an exploiter of war, and a deficit hawk.

This statement is very similar to Trump’s statements about Iraq where he has mentioned the idea of taking the country’s oil and to give it to the United States.

Shakir who eventually became Sanders’ campaign manager also asked Hillary Clinton a difficult question about the Iraq War and as Tanden being the senior aide to Clinton, she punched him in the chest.

Tanden also advocated cuts for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid stating, “The president (Obama) has $300 million in his budget in cuts in Medicare…That comes on top of cuts in Medicare for the Affordable Care Act. So he has put specific cuts in the budget in Medicare…And they had savings in Medicaid in the past. I think the question really is: If we’re going to have a deal to address long-term deficit reduction, we need to put both entitlements on the table as well as taxes”.

She has also bashed medicare for all countless times and has made false claims about it, stating that it does not have majority support, it would cost more for Americans and that other countries such as France were suffering because they have universal healthcare systems.

As President of the Center for American Progress, you would expect her to be more progressive.

In short, Tanden was denied OMB Director for the wrong reasons, yet it was an overall convenience for these senators to land on the correct position.

Neera Tanden is not an ally of the Progressive Movement, she is someone that has and will continue to undermine progressive policies and smear those who oppose her beliefs.