Economix Blog: New Leader for Liberal Research Group

A veteran of the Obama and Clinton administrations, Neera Tanden, will be taking over as president of the Center for American Progress, a research organization that represents the views of the president’s more liberal, and somewhat disaffected, base.

She will succeed John Podesta, who ran President Obama’s transition team and served as White House chief of staff to President Clinton, on Nov. 1. Mr. Podesta will remain at the organization as non-executive chairman of the board.

In an interview on Monday, Ms. Tanden said she hoped “big ideas,” both from  her organization and other progressives, would help unite the left in the year leading up to the next presidential election. Recent national polls show that Mr. Obama is behind the Republican candidate on a generic ballot.

“There’s a lack of faith in our ability to solve large-scale problems together, and that weakens the progressive cause,” she said. “There’s big hunger for bigger solutions, and some of the reaction we’re seeing in this country is a rejection of the current discourse in Washington.”

She said she believed that Mr. Obama’s recent push for more economic stimulus intended to create jobs may be winning him back more liberal supporters who had felt alienated by his push for austerity measures.

Ms. Tanden is  the chief operating officer at the Center for American Progress, and served as senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped shape the Affordable Care Act. She said that despite continuing criticism of the health care legislation passed last year, she did not anticipate that Congressional Republicans would make a serious attempt to dismantle it before the next election.

“There were two moments where Republicans had had levers over the Senate and the White House to dismantle the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “One was the government shutdown, and the other was the debt limit deal. In neither case did they use those levers to destroy the Affordable Care Act.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b6d1b3a9fb654b17b9be8382cef4eb11