Harris can reset Democrats’ relations with business

Matthew Yglesias, Tribune News Service

President Joe Biden has been objectively good for business, especially relative to the risk of the chaos that would follow Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Yet it’s no secret that the relationship between Biden and the business community has been poor. The presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris offers Democrats the chance for a reset, especially given her stronger ties to California’s tech community and popularity with Wall Street donors. But she and her party need to be careful about how they do it: Any change in attitude can’t be seen as a quid pro quo for a change of position or a large donation, but rather as worthwhile on its own terms.

In other words: It’s not about money or any specific policy. It’s a vibe shift. In this sense, public calls for Harris to fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, as some Democratic donors did last week, are not helpful. What Harris needs to do is make a commitment to be more open to talent with private-sector experience. Biden didn’t exclude people with business backgrounds, but none of his cabinet members is drawn from the private sector, and in his administration experience in the business world has generally been viewed as a mark against a candidate.

How did the party end up here? This posture originates in a fight that Senator Elizabeth Warren picked in 2015 over the nomination of Antonio Weiss for the obscure position of undersecretary of Treasury for domestic finance. Weiss, a liberal Democrat in good standing as far as anyone could tell, was deemed unacceptable for the role simply because he was a successful investment banker before coming under consideration for a government job. Warren successfully enlisted many of her Senate colleagues in joining the anti-Weiss campaign. Safe-seat Democratic senators who had no particular interest in who served as undersecretary of whatever understood that the real question was whether they wanted to be in a fight with Warren, and most decided that they did not. Republicans, in turn, had no interest in resolving this intraparty dispute. So Weiss’ nomination was withdrawn, and he was given a job that did not require Senate confirmation.

At the time, it seemed like a pyrrhic victory for Warren. But it had laid the groundwork for bigger things. When Biden won in 2020, Warren placed many allies and alumni in his administration. And Gautam Raghavan, a former chief of staff to House Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal, runs the Office of Presidential Personnel, which has broad influence over administration staffing. That doesn’t mean every Biden appointee is a hard-core leftist. The president has deep experience on foreign policy and picks his own national security team, while moderates such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wield influence on the economic front. But it does mean that picks on the domestic side need to run through a gauntlet where any private-sector work on the resume is a red flag. Dispensation can sometimes be granted. But in general, anyone who’s worked in industry faces an uphill battle.

It would be neither wise nor appropriate for Harris to make any commitments about specific jobs. But she should commit to reversing this presumption — because it makes no sense on the merits. Of course, nobody wants a revolving-door administration staffed by officials regulating industries they used to work in. But neither should anyone want a team composed exclusively of professors and non-profit lifers, or think such a group would offer the public the best talent available. For starters, it skews the personnel pool toward grim ideologues and away from normal people who just happen to share Democrats’ stated concerns about reproductive freedom, democracy and the importance of the social safety net. It also deprives the executive branch of people with basic management skills, which are often lacking in academia.

Last but by no means least, industry ties can be a transmission belt for practical knowledge. At several key junctures during the Biden years — the port snarls, relaunching the domestic oil industry, the Silicon Valley Bank crisis — the administration found itself lacking in-house expertise on important questions. More broadly, tech and finance are two of America’s leading sectors. As a result, they tend to employ a large share of the country’s smartest and hardest-working people. The idea that they would be ineligible for government service, or that their experience would count against them, is almost self-evidently absurd. As Jamie Dimon says: “A president should put the most talented people, including those from business and the opposite party, into their Cabinet.”