Bring back the revolving door!

A Harris administration should be open to private sector talent

Democratic administrations used to feature a particular type of person.

He or she was a prominent businessperson who typically lived in a big coastal city and had typical big coastal city attitudes about things. This person probably thought the NRA was bad. He or she was a pro-choice feminist who found the prospect of governance by the Christian right alarming. He was relatively wealthy but felt sentimental about poor people and supported the idea of spending more money, broadly speaking, on helping the needy. While this person worked in business, it wasn’t generally a natural resource extraction business, and she believed in the importance of trusting science and worrying about pollution.

This person was, in other words, a pretty typical Democrat.

As you can imagine, a number of businesspeople who fit this profile ended up staffing previous Democratic presidents. We might be talking about young people interested in switching careers or exploring new opportunities in public service. Or we might be talking about people of stature who would only consider senior government roles.

But Joe Biden’s administration, unlike Barack Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s, hasn’t included any businesspeople in the cabinet. That’s not a coincidence.

There has been a concerted, years-long, somewhat successful pressure effort inside the Democratic Party to start counting private sector experience as a negative. And I’m reliably told that, up and down the Biden administration, job candidates from the private sector are at a disadvantage. One of the big anxieties — or hopes, depending on who you ask — floating through Washington, DC during Candidate Swap Summer is that Kamala Harris might take a different approach. You can see this in Matt Stoller’s recent NYT op-ed, which starts by saying “it’s unclear what Kamala Harris thinks about corporate power,” but mostly devotes itself to complaining that she has some associates who have worked in the private sector.

I don’t have any inside information about Harris and her inner circle’s position on this, but I do think the left’s basic fear here is plausible for several specific reasons — primarily because leftists know that the deal they got out of Biden was kind of unusual, and any arbitrary re-roll of the dice is unlikely to land as favorably to them. They don’t have the opportunity of a primary to extract unwise concessions from Harris, so they’re fretting.

And now I want to make the case that Biden’s experiment in staffing an administration as fully as possible with professors and nonprofit lifers has not been a smashing success and that Harris should open the doors to talent from all walks of life.

The Biden bargain didn’t really work

One reason this question has opened up since the debate is that moderate Democrats in DC have pretty profoundly mixed feelings about the Biden administration. A phrase I’d heard many times is “we won the primary but lost the staffing.” There were a lot of regrets about this, but also moderates really had won the primary and got not only the presidential candidate they preferred, but also senior aides like Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, and Steve Richetti who they liked. It was their (our?) play, and they had to back it publicly even though they didn’t ultimately like the outcome. With the ticket swapped, not only is the left anxious they may end up with a different bargain, but moderates are able to articulate their own mixed feelings about how the staffing shook out.

And one reason those feelings are mixed is that to the extent Biden tried to structure a parliamentary-style coalition, the deal didn’t really work.

Ours, after all, is not a parliamentary government. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have their allies running economic regulatory agencies, and Pramila Jayapal’s former chief of staff runs the Office of Presidential Personnel (and makes it hard for moderates to secure low-level appointments in second-tier cabinet departments), but that doesn’t prevent Warren or Sanders or Jayapal from criticizing Biden’s policies on Gaza. There is no formalized coalition agreement, and nobody is bound by any vague implicit understandings that may have existed in the past. What’s more, even if progressive members of congress were inclined to exert that kind of discipline, it would cost them their credibility in the eyes of their own grassroots.

The flip side is that electorally, the move to stiff-arm business Democrats did not conjure into being some new populist electoral coalition. Biden has been the strongest ally that labor union leaders have ever had, but that hasn’t stopped the drift of blue collar union members into the GOP camp, because the issues pushing people in that direction aren’t “labor” issues — it’s things like guns and immigration that Republicans use to appeal to blue collar workers who aren’t in unions. The standard move by leftists is to bend the space-time continuum with arguments like this one from Stoller, who says that “during the Clinton and Obama administrations, which were both overly sympathetic to big business, working-class and rural voters left the party in droves.” That’s a funny way of saying that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both more business-friendly than Joe Biden and also better at winning working-class and rural voters than Biden.

I don’t want to say they were better at this because they were more business-friendly. But in general, if you’re talking about winning the votes of people who identify as politically moderate, it’s probably good to do things that code as moderate — which means populist gestures if you’re a Republican, but business-friendly ones if you’re a Democrat.

Looking back beyond Clinton, the effort to conjure up a new political alignment by exiling business is totally ahistorical. JFK’s cabinet only had 10 people, of whom four were businessmen. I think the architects of this strategy genuinely believe that they are executing a style of politics that’s supposed to appeal to working class people. But the actual upshot of their efforts isn’t that we have a lot of construction workers and and Walmart assistant managers running the government. By over-indexing on academics and NGO types, you make your personnel more sociologically isolated, not less so.

Everyone has interests and conflicts

One consequence of this sociological isolation that has really struck me hard during the Biden years is a failure to see that potential conflicts of interest are not limited to the corporate sector. The majority of America’s colleges and universities, for example, are organized as nonprofits or public institutions. But just like any business, they have revenue, and they have expenses. They have top managers, and they have middle managers, and they have employees. Some employees are highly paid and have high status roles in the organization, and other employees have lower-paid, lower-status jobs. It would be flip to say that Amherst or Yale is exactly like a for-profit business, but it would be naive to say that Amherst and Yale are totally unlike for-profit businesses. They all like money and dislike regulatory oversight.

The question of what exactly to say or do about the problems of people who took out student loans during the weak labor market of the Great Recession and then struggled to secure remunerative employment is somewhat difficult.

The specific thing that the Biden administration did — shift a lot of that debt overhand off individuals’ balance sheets and onto the federal balance sheet, while doing nothing to penalize the institutions that took the money — happens to be awfully convenient to the higher education industry. It feels to me a lot like a targeted bailout of an economic sector that is facing a lot of demographic pressure and that happens to have a lot of sympathetic ears inside the Biden administration. Of course it would be crazy for Democrats to try to staff the government without any recourse to professors. Professors have a lot of expertise on many subjects, and they are also overwhelmingly Democrats. It would be extremely foolish not to tap into that talent pool.

But by the same token, the Biden administration has wrestled with a bunch of problems where academic expertise is maybe not that useful:

• How do you get the oil industry restarted after a pandemic-induced price crash when you don’t yet have the electric car fleet of the future in place?

• How do you construct a semiconductor fab?

• How do you address a short-term port capacity crunch?

In all these cases, the administration needed to consult people with industry experience — mostly people outside the government — because who else are you going to ask? There is obviously a conflict of interest risk any time you call up an oil industry guy and ask him, “What would get you pumping more oil?” But unless you are genuinely indifferent to the answer, which Biden clearly was not when gasoline prices spiked, you need to ask the people who know about this stuff. The conflict of interest is actually much smaller if you have some industry veterans working for you than if you’re forced to rely on present practitioners.

The same thing happens in Congress.

The Manchin-Barrasso permitting bill has divided climate “wonks” from climate “activists,” because one set is listening to what the renewable energy industry says will lead to the generation of more renewable energy and the other is doing activism. Of course there are conflicts of interest here, too. But to me, the idea of trying to do a clean energy transition without listening to the clean energy companies doesn’t make sense. In fact, on some level, this is so clear that even the biggest anti-business scolds don’t play by their own rules.

The game is rigged

It’s hard to get into this without becoming personal on a level that I am not particularly comfortable with. But one source of a lot of grumbling I’ve heard from people who’ve been in the trenches is that National Economic Council deputy director Jon Donenberg is married to a lawyer for pharmaceutical companies. Watchdog groups like the Revolving Door Project have never raised a peep of objection to this, because Donenberg is a former Warren staffer and the whole network has zero concern about his ideological reliability. And to be clear, the people who whine to me about this also do not think Donenberg is going to sell out to Big Pharma! But they are generally people with more moderate economic policy views who are well aware that this kind of family connection would be used to spike any effort to hire people who they find congenial.

People on the left who are worried about Harris make a big deal out of the fact that her brother-in-law, former Associate Attorney General Tony West, works as general counsel at Uber.

Many of these same people have not complained that Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, works as general counsel at Airbnb. Personally, I usually agree with both Uber and Airbnb in political and regulatory controversies, so I have zero problem with either of these career paths. But the reason Klain gets a pass from people who don’t give West a pass is that Klain was the architect of the coalition strategy that has benefitted leftists. Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust who is beloved by the left, is a classic revolving door case — he went from the FTC to corporate law and then rotated back into this big job at the Justice Department. They love Kanter because he agrees with them on policy, which is a great reason to like someone, and don’t mind that he should be disqualified by the fake rules they have set up.

I think the Kanter precedent in particular is worth paying attention to, not just as a question of hypocrisy, but in terms of the broader logic of the question. There has been a lot of controversy about Lina Khan ever since a couple of Democratic tech donors clumsily suggested firing her. A lot of tech people really do hate her for basically self-interested reasons. But the concern I’ve heard about her chairship for years from people with a good-faith interest in antitrust law is about their doubts that she can actually win cases — doubts that have not been raised about Kanter precisely because he is a veteran private sector attorney. One thing that big rich companies like to do is hire people who are smart, effective, and hard-working, and if there are people like that who agree with your policy views and want to work for you, it’s a good idea to hire them.

Be normal!

This gets me back to what I said last week about Democrats’ embrace of the idea that Republicans are weird.

The best way to make this land is to self-reflect a little on how Democrats can be more normal themselves. Working for for-profit companies is very normal. Most people like their jobs, and in particular, they like their coworkers and their supervisors. The main sources of workplace dissatisfaction are about pay, benefits, and opportunities for promotion. Those are important grievances. But on an industry or company level, they suggest a desire for the government to do things that will make your company more successful.

If you’re a middle manager at Acme, Inc. and you enjoy your job and your coworkers and your direct supervisor but wish you could get a raise and a promotion, then you don’t particularly want to hear that the government wants to crush the industry you work in or that the people who work in the government believe that it is per se corrupt for someone to want to see your industry succeed. Normal people don’t think that selling goods and services to willing customers is a less noble pursuit than hustling for grant money.

What’s more, it directly undermines Democrats’ core messages when they suggest that nobody could work as a bank executive but also sincerely believe that Donald Trump is a menace to democracy, that abortion rights are important, that climate change is a big problem, and that Democratic Party economic policy will deliver broad-based prosperity. It’s good to have people agree with you and join your team to help you do things. To the extent that this is actually just an argument about public policy issues, we should argue about public policy issues, not about what jobs people used to have.