Competing interests complicate Cabinet choices
The votes in last month’s presidential election were still being counted when the Democratic Party’s progressive factions began to warn President-elect Joe Biden against pursuing too centrist a course.
“It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’ … which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats — but which ignored the progressive community,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told The Associated Press.
“I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach,” Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez told The New York Times.
And as Biden began to announce his top choices for an administration that he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have vowed “looks like America,” similar warnings came from the party’s powerful Black, Hispanic and Asian American factions.
“We want to see more Hispanics, more Latinos,” Sen.-elect Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., said Sunday on CNN. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on Biden in a CBSN interview to restore “the priority of civil rights.”
Biden has seemed publicly unfazed. “That’s their job,” he replied when asked about the pressure at one of his news conferences. He urged that critics wait until he completes his Cabinet selections before rendering judgment.
At the same time, he appears to be on his way to meeting their demands and his promises.
On Monday, he named the Hispanic attorney general of California as secretary of health and human services; his earlier appointees included a Cuban-born secretary of homeland security and a retired African American diplomat as ambassador to the United Nations.
And his transition passed the word that Biden has picked retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin as the first Black secretary of defense. That added diversity to the top Cabinet posts, which already included a white man, Secretary of State designate Antony Blinken, and a white woman, Secretary of the Treasury designate Janet Yellen.
More than for any Republican, Democratic presidents need to balance an array of competing ideological and racial interests to reflect their party’s greater diversity. Biden also needs to consider the fact that the Senate that will confirm his top choices will be narrowly divided, whichever party wins the majority in next month’s Georgia Senate runoffs. Already, one of his choices, former Hillary Clinton adviser Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, has angered both Democratic progressives and some Republicans. Some Republicans questioned the health credentials of Xavier Becerra, Biden’s Health and Human Services choice.
Progressives praised Becerra. But they will inevitably be dissatisfied to some degree as they sometimes were by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, especially the latter. Biden made clear in winning both the Democratic nomination and the general election that he was more a centrist than a progressive Democrat.
Biden’s first selections indicate that a crucial consideration for him is choosing people whose experience will enable them to get off to a fast start after Jan. 20, while also reflecting the party’s changing demographics.
More than once, the 78-year-old former vice president has referred to himself as a “bridge” to a younger generation, and it is already possible to see how that may be reflected in his personnel decisions.
For example, when he picked Yellen as treasury secretary, Biden gave the No. 2 position to Adewale Adeyemo, a 39-year-old Nigerian born international trade expert who will become the highest ranking African American ever at the department.
It would hardly be surprising if the 74-year-old former Federal Reserve chair served for a couple of years before turning the job over
Adeyemo, who would be a racial and generational groundbreaker.
The way in which competing interests complicate the president-elect’s Cabinet choices has been especially evident in the speculation over who will become secretary of agriculture.
Sources within Biden’s transition were initially quoted as mentioning two main candidates, Rep. Marcia Fudge, an African American from Cleveland who is a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who then Presidentelect Donald Trump considered four years ago. She lost her Senate seat in 2018.
Fudge’s candidacy reflected the fact that most of the agriculture department budget goes for food and nutrition programs, many serving urban minorities in cities like Cleveland.
Heitkamp, meanwhile, represented the department’s more traditional constituency, the largely white rural Farm Belt areas where Democrats have performed poorly of late.
In the end, neither Fudge nor Heitkamp is getting the farm job, but Biden is recognizing the latter problem by bringing back Obama’s agriculture secretary, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. Meanwhile, Politico reported Fudge would be named secretary of housing and urban development.
One crucial factor helping Biden in his Cabinet selections is that, unlike Trump, he knows most of the prospective choices. That should produce a far more coherent administration than the last one.