That is, until she apologized enough after Biden appointed her to be his budget director.
“I think the past few years have been quite polarizing and I apologize for my language that contributed to this,” said Ms. Tanden to members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs this month. “I know that it is up to me to demonstrate to this committee and to the Republican and Democratic members that I can work with anyone.” She noted that she had deleted many of her old tweets.
It’s not a problem, because the Republicans were more than happy to refresh the memory of her and everyone else.
“You wrote that Susan Collins is, in quotation marks, ‘the worst’, that Tom Cotton is a fraud,” said Sen. Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, scolding Mrs. Tanden. “How do you plan to repair the fences and build relationships with members of Congress that you attacked through your public statements?”
Mr. Portman continued to read some more examples, including Ms. Tanden’s statement that “vampires have more hearts than Ted Cruz”. (Mr. Cruz, who was soon bound for Cancún, was one of the few people who seemed to be having less fun than Mrs. Tanden.)
As technology evolves, so do Washington’s traffic rules. In the past, potential job seekers could have been harmed by various “indiscretions”, “previous statements” or certain things they could have said “in the heat of the moment”. All of this is basically Twitter in a nutshell.
“People who want big jobs in Washington are always told to ‘avoid the paper trail,'” said Tevi Troy, presidential historian and White House official during the George W. Bush administration. This usually refers only to potentially inflammatory books, articles or speeches. Then Twitter came along and offered a treacherous new type of paper trail. Now anyone can destroy themselves in 280 characters or less in just a few seconds.
Progress!
“It’s almost worse than a paper trail,” said Troy on Twitter. “It is more like a diary than you are thinking at any given time.”