basquebromance
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2015
- 109,396
- 27,004
- 2,220
- Banned
- #1
with the grand ambitions of Joe Biden’s first year or so dead and buried, the 2022 midterms seemed to serve as a chapter break ending the first, pseudo-Rooseveltian phase of his presidency. We can’t know exactly what the next phase is going to entail, but we may have just gotten a big clue.
How does a man whose career is checkered with corporate malfeasance, chumminess with CEOs, austerity-driven cost-cutting, and advocacy for lower corporate tax rates and more fossil fuel drilling fit with a Rooseveltian vision of expanded government and a new, green economy for the working class?
The answer is it doesn’t — which might be the point. Rather than jeopardizing Biden’s populist vision, Zients’s appointment may well signal that the version of Biden’s presidency sold to us and briefly entertained by the president is well and truly over, that it might be reverting back to something more typically expected from Biden and his party. Ominously, this comes just as the GOP has taken the House, and is preparing an attempt to force the president to accept Draconian spending cuts.
The Left couldn’t stop Zients’s ascent. But it should be prepared to stand against any regressive measures it ends up producing.
Despite Klain’s questionable record, he won progressives over through what seemed like genuine efforts at outreach, making them feel — unusually, for a modern White House occupied by either party — that their ideas were being factored into policymaking. Zients would’ve struggled to fill his shoes no matter what. But his sketchy past has made that a particularly tall order, and possibly signals that Biden is ready to ditch the already tenuous progressive populist approach of his first two years.
good government groups were already less than enthused by Zients when he was picked to head Biden’s pandemic response, given his corporate background. For one, Zients got his start out of college, as he explained in 2014, at “a company that I didn’t talk a lot about for a period of time but now I talk openly about, which is Bain & Company in Boston,” where he had a “great experience.” The reason he hadn’t talked about it was that Bain, once headed by Barack Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney, had been the target of a quite justified demonization campaign by the Obama camp, which depicted it a ruthless corporate raider.
Zients made his real break at the Advisory Group, and then its spin-off, the Corporate Executive Board, a management consulting firm that compiled confidential details from executives into reports about best and worst business practices, which it then sold back to the corporate world. What did that advice entail? Don’t bother trying to reestablish the social contract between worker and boss after a round of layoffs because it’s gone forever.
Zients estimated that “a good 10-15 percent of my time is meeting with CEOs, entrepreneurs, labor leaders” to work out economic policy, with a particular emphasis on the first two, because “in many ways business people on the front lines are our customers” and “they are creating the jobs.” Once asked if someone in the private sector who wanted to lobby or give their views on economic policy should simply call him up directly, he responded that it was he who went out of his way to be in close touch with these “customers,” by attending forums of business leaders multiple times a week and “meet[ing] one-on-one with several CEOs a week” to get feedback.
At one point, he was part of a White House standoff with Elizabeth Warren over the ultimately doomed nomination of Wall Street banker Antonio Weiss to a Treasury post. Zients sang Weiss’s praises to the end, explaining that government needed “a broad set of experiences and skills and talents,” including “people who have not served in government before that bring a certain perspective, people with business experience, people with financial experience.” It’s not clear why Zients seemed to think former Wall Street bankers were an underrepresented minority in government ranks.
www.politico.com
How does a man whose career is checkered with corporate malfeasance, chumminess with CEOs, austerity-driven cost-cutting, and advocacy for lower corporate tax rates and more fossil fuel drilling fit with a Rooseveltian vision of expanded government and a new, green economy for the working class?
The answer is it doesn’t — which might be the point. Rather than jeopardizing Biden’s populist vision, Zients’s appointment may well signal that the version of Biden’s presidency sold to us and briefly entertained by the president is well and truly over, that it might be reverting back to something more typically expected from Biden and his party. Ominously, this comes just as the GOP has taken the House, and is preparing an attempt to force the president to accept Draconian spending cuts.
The Left couldn’t stop Zients’s ascent. But it should be prepared to stand against any regressive measures it ends up producing.
Despite Klain’s questionable record, he won progressives over through what seemed like genuine efforts at outreach, making them feel — unusually, for a modern White House occupied by either party — that their ideas were being factored into policymaking. Zients would’ve struggled to fill his shoes no matter what. But his sketchy past has made that a particularly tall order, and possibly signals that Biden is ready to ditch the already tenuous progressive populist approach of his first two years.
good government groups were already less than enthused by Zients when he was picked to head Biden’s pandemic response, given his corporate background. For one, Zients got his start out of college, as he explained in 2014, at “a company that I didn’t talk a lot about for a period of time but now I talk openly about, which is Bain & Company in Boston,” where he had a “great experience.” The reason he hadn’t talked about it was that Bain, once headed by Barack Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney, had been the target of a quite justified demonization campaign by the Obama camp, which depicted it a ruthless corporate raider.
Zients made his real break at the Advisory Group, and then its spin-off, the Corporate Executive Board, a management consulting firm that compiled confidential details from executives into reports about best and worst business practices, which it then sold back to the corporate world. What did that advice entail? Don’t bother trying to reestablish the social contract between worker and boss after a round of layoffs because it’s gone forever.
Zients estimated that “a good 10-15 percent of my time is meeting with CEOs, entrepreneurs, labor leaders” to work out economic policy, with a particular emphasis on the first two, because “in many ways business people on the front lines are our customers” and “they are creating the jobs.” Once asked if someone in the private sector who wanted to lobby or give their views on economic policy should simply call him up directly, he responded that it was he who went out of his way to be in close touch with these “customers,” by attending forums of business leaders multiple times a week and “meet[ing] one-on-one with several CEOs a week” to get feedback.
At one point, he was part of a White House standoff with Elizabeth Warren over the ultimately doomed nomination of Wall Street banker Antonio Weiss to a Treasury post. Zients sang Weiss’s praises to the end, explaining that government needed “a broad set of experiences and skills and talents,” including “people who have not served in government before that bring a certain perspective, people with business experience, people with financial experience.” It’s not clear why Zients seemed to think former Wall Street bankers were an underrepresented minority in government ranks.
Jeff Zients is Mr. Fix It. But he’s never had a slate of challenges like this.
The incoming chief of staff comes aboard as Biden enters a new stretch in his presidency.
www.politico.com
