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The new leader of one of the Democratic Party’s leading institutions, the Center for American Progress, said in an interview that her party needs to oppose Donald Trump across the board — but also offer voters more appealing alternatives.
“No is better than yes. But just saying ‘no’ makes us vulnerable to the critique that we are just defenders of the status quo,” said Neera Tanden, who was named Thursday the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a role she previously held from 2012 to 2020.
“We’re in a competition of ideas,” Tanden told Semafor. “Trump has ideas. We’re in a competition with him for whose ideas are better.”
She arrives in the role as public polling shows Democratic voters are almost as disappointed in their own elected officials as they are appalled by Republicans. Tanden and CAP, with an annual budget around $50 million, are as close as the Democratic Party gets to an establishment.
Tanden has managed to span the party’s divides: A key aide to Hillary Clinton since Bill Clinton’s presidency and through the 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns, she was among the relatively few Clintonites who took top roles in the Obama administration.
She played a central role in the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act before leaving to run CAP, where Wikileaks swept her into the Democrats’ bitter internecine battles. (She notes that she’s since worked regularly with Senator Bernie Sanders, and was as we spoke “retweeting Senator Sanders’ speech on Russia.”)
Tanden later spent four years in Joe Biden’s administration, dropping a bid to become his budget chief over fiery tweets in that very different era, and then directing his Domestic Policy Council.
Now she’s wrestling with a central question of her party’s identity: Can it offer more than appalled support for business as usual against a rampant Trump and Elon Musk?
“We are not the incumbents. We should not be knee-jerk institution defenders,” Tanden said. “People do want change. We have to argue why our vision of change is better.”
But that will begin, she said, with confrontational opposition.
“The most important thing about Trump is that he’s a bully, and if you cower he will take your breakfast money and your lunch money. He’ll take all your money,” she said. “I’m a fighter, and I’m ready for the fight.”
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Tanden succeeds Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama adviser and past leader of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. She takes over CAP at a moment when Democratic leaders’ frustrations include the work ethic of their own staff — who many worry are too focused on issues of justice inside their own workplace while young Republicans outwork them.
In her first run at CAP, Tanden occasionally clashed with her staff over what were, in retrospect, early signs of that conflict.
“We’re in a moment of maximum peril, and it is a great privilege to work at a place like the Center for American Progress, where we are trying to work on behalf of a lot of people who face a lot of harm,” she said, asked about Democrats’ broad complaints about their own aides.
“If you believe you’re in a battle for the soul of the country, then you have to act like you’re in a battle for the soul of the country,” she added.
On a number of issues, Tanden stressed that Democrats need to oppose Trump while offering alternatives.
With border crossings at record lows in recent months, for example, she argued that “the lion’s share of that work” was done by a Biden executive order in June.
“We can’t ignore a topic that matters a lot to people because we think it helps his side, not our side. This was the lesson on immigration. We got to an answer on this — very late,” she said. “We can’t [oppose] mass deportations unless we have a strong immigration plan that includes reforms of asylum and the border.”
Of Trump’s assault on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, she said: “We should be clear that diversity matters to people and how it improves things. But when it feels like you’re preferencing one group over another — the first principle here is that we’re all equal, and we support diversity.”
When it comes to public safety, she noted that “working-class people are victims of crime at a way higher level than upper-income people, and they see that as a security issue.”
And as Trump and Vice President JD Vance lean heavily into gender as a cultural flashpoint Tanden said the Democratic Party needs to take the issues facing young men more seriously.
“There is something happening with fewer opportunities for younger men, and it’s driving a lot of anger. And it’s creating a gender chasm — that’s a problem we should try to understand,” she said. “The right is exploiting that by saying, ‘You’re down because the left hates you.’ There is a fundamental issue there.”
Ben’s view
Some Democrats are asking themselves whether the party should borrow then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s 2009 playbook and become the “Party of No,” simply rejecting every Trump initiative just as McConnell fought Obama. The now-retiring Republican senator recognized (accurately) that his voters sought that and would reward it.
Tanden said that approach is necessary, but not sufficient. She compared this moment to Democrats’ past wilderness years of 2004 and 2016. During both of those cycles, the party shifted quickly from panic into organized opposition to unpopular Republican domestic policies: After 2004 it was the privatization of elements of Social Security, while the 2016 election saw the GOP get fatally tangled in attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
I asked Tanden, at my colleague David Weigel’s suggestion, whether CAP would produce a “Project 2029,” a hypothetical Democratic version of the conservative agenda that Trump disavowed but ended up mirroring and shaping his administration’s thinking.
She declined to slap a label on the project, but said she does see CAP’s role as building a party consensus on a new agenda, and a new tone.
“It’s important to have a spirit of reform,” she said. ”This is what progress is: It’s taking the problems you have and fixing them.
“We should be focused on solving problems for people — not on just defending the institutions,” she added.
But Tanden said she was still working through why her former boss Biden had failed so fully to persuade voters that his domestic agenda was helping them. The Democratic economist Jason Furman, a former top Obama aide, has argued that “Bidenomics” simply fell short, but Tanden rejected that.
“I don’t think Bidenomics failed in doing the things it said it would do. It created very low unemployment. It took a while, but it created wage increases,” she said. “We have to really understand as a party why a program that spent hundreds of billions of dollars for investments in jobs for people [of whom] 70% don’t have a college degree — why that didn’t resonate at all.
“I don’t know if it’s that we didn’t communicate it, or people didn’t care,” she said.
As Trump offers a dramatically different vision of slashed government spending, understanding that failure to resonate might help Democrats climb out of the hole. Or Perhaps that’s a problem that Democrats, now in opposition, won’t have to solve.
Notable
- Tanden’s hire was first reported by the New York Times.