The New York Times - USA (2020-12-02)

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALWEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020 N A

Transition in WashingtonThe Democrats

WASHINGTON — Five years
ago, Jeffrey D. Zients was the
head of the Obama administra-
tion’s National Economic Council,
working to push across the finish
line a federal rule that would pre-
vent financial advisers from tak-
ing advantage of retirees. He won
praise from progressives for fend-
ing off fierce resistance from Wall
Street and for fighting for con-
sumer protections.
These days, Mr. Zients is a co-
chairman of President-elect Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr.’s transition team
who is being watched warily by
members of Democratic Party’s
left wing. Progressive advocacy
groups such as the Revolving
Door Project and Justice Demo-
crats, concerned that he would de-
fend corporate America if given a
top economic policy job in the Bi-
den administration, pushed to
keep him out of such a role. They
view his recent work running an
investment fund — Cranemere —
and sitting on the board of Face-
book as a detriment.
The pre-emptive resistance to
Mr. Zients (pronounced ZYE-
ents) from the left is the latest in-
dication of how the Democratic
Party has shifted in the dozen
years since former President
Barack Obama took office amid
the financial crisis. Now, business
and finance experience can turn
otherwise qualified White House
candidates into pariahs for pro-
gressives.
Mr. Zients, 54, has emerged as
an important power center in the
Biden transition team and was
mentioned as a possible candidate
to once again lead the National
Economic Council or head the Of-
fice of Management and Budget, a
role he held in an acting capacity
during the Obama administration.
With those jobs set to be filled by
others, Mr. Zients is the front-run-
ner, according to people familiar
with the transition team’s plans, to
be the Biden administration’s
Covid czar, steering the govern-
ment’s response to the coronavi-
rus pandemic.

In a sign of the pushback to come, the Revolving Door Project has been urging Mr. Biden to keep corporate influence out of his administration, has compiled a 13- page document about Mr. Zients. The file highlights his wealth, his appetite for deficit reduction during the Obama years and his recent work as chief executive of Cranemere. In the Obama administration, “his role was essentially to be a management consultant for the executive branch: cutting costs, finding efficiencies and looking at things like a businessman,” the Revolving Door document says. The group points to the majority stake that Cranemere took in NorthStar Anesthesia, a company that provides anesthesia services to hospitals and medical offices, in

It cites negative reviews that
NorthStar Anesthesia received
through the Better Business Bu-
reau, including allegations of sur-
prise billing and a threat to send a
dental patient’s bill to a collection
agency during a dispute over in-
surance coverage. That matter
was resolved, according to The
Philadelphia Inquirer.
A spokeswoman for NorthStar
said that within two months of
Cranemere’s acquisition of the
company, it had ended its practice

of “balance billing” — charging patients the difference between the cost of their services and what their insurers will pay. Jennifer Psaki, a spokeswoman for the Bi- den transition team, said Mr. Zients opposes surprise billing practices. “Jeff, like President-elect Biden, supports legislation to stop surprise billing by forcing the entire

health care system to limit patient payments to in-network rates for all procedures and providers not preapproved by the patient,” Ms. Psaki said. Progressives have been push- ing the Biden transition team to install their preferred candidates in top roles and have been fairly supportive of some of Mr. Biden’s early picks. These include Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Re- serve chair, to be Treasury secretary; Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton University labor economist, to run

the Council of Economic Advis- ers; and Neera Tanden, the chief executive of the Center for Ameri- can Progress, to lead the Office of Management and Budget. But others are triggering a backlash, including Brian Deese, whom Mr. Biden has tapped to head the National Economic Council, and Adewale Adeyemo, the president-elect’s choice for deputy Treasury secretary. Both men have worked at the asset management firm BlackRock, and many in the progressive wing view deep industry ties as a red flag. “Democrats should over all be alarmed by any Democratic administration considering filling the White House with Wall Street insiders and corporate lobbyists,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesman for Justice Democrats, a political action committee. Early in his career, Mr. Zients worked as a consultant at Bain & Company before joining the Advi- sory Board Company, a health care research and consulting firm, where he rose to chief executive. He helped lead a spinoff of that business, which became the Cor- porate Executive Board, and both companies ultimately went public, in 1999 and 2001. According to Fortune, the Advisory Board’s profitable initial public offering helped fuel Mr. Zients’s net worth, which the magazine placed at nearly $150 million by 2002. In 2009, Mr. Zients joined the Of- fice of Management and Budget as “chief performance officer,” ris- ing to prominence within the Obama administration as a “Mr. Fix-It” with strong operations skills and a knack for solving tough problems. Obama administration officials remember him for reviving the Affordable Care Act’s website, HealthCare.gov, after glitches plagued its rollout. “I call him the ultimate fire- fighter on these jobs,” said Denis R. McDonough, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, who asked Mr. Zients to take on the project of fixing the website in 2013. “He runs into the burning buildings. He doesn’t ask

why. He doesn’t ask when. He doesn’t ask who’s going with him.” Later in Mr. Obama’s second term, Mr. Zients led the National Economic Council, where he shep- herded new regulations to crack down on payday lending and steered the development of the so- called fiduciary rule — a require- ment that financial professionals put the interests of their customers with retirement ac- counts ahead of their own. The La- bor Department rule, which the financial services and insurance in- dustries strongly challenged, was struck down by a federal appeals court in 2018. Those efforts earned him acco- lades from some progressive Democrats. “The government needs talent and experience,” said Dennis Kel- leher, the president of Better Mar- kets, which promotes Wall Street reform, and a member of Mr. Bi- den’s transition review team for the Fed, banking and securities regulators. “People who are going to try to regulate an industry as complicated as finance can’t say we’re only going to hire people who know nothing about finance.” But his role as a bridge to business during the Obama administration has raised some eyebrows. Mr. Zients was one of the administration’s chief liaisons to executives and lobbyists when anger at Wall Street over the 2007-8 financial crisis was still at its peak. Top lobbyists such as the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have praised Mr. Zients as someone who heard them out. Describing his desire to listen to business leaders, Mr. Zients told executives at a 2014 event at the Economic Club of Washington, “You are the customers, all of you as business leaders, in terms of growing the economy.” After Mr. Obama left office, Mr. Zients joined the private equity in- vestor Vincent Mai’s Cranemere fund as chief executive. The private holding company has invest- ors from United States, Europe, Latin America and the Middle

East and takes a long-term invest- ing approach in the mold of War- ren E. Buffett. Mr. Zients, who is on leave from Cranemere, also spent two years on the board of Facebook and was a member of the company’s audit committee. He has told people that he had concerns about the company’s direction and govern- ance, and opted not to seek re- election to the board this year. Facebook has come under fire from Democrats for allowing the spread of disinformation and from Republicans who accuse it of cen- sorship. Jeff Hauser, the director of the Revolving Door Project, said Mr. Zients’s experience working in private equity and at Facebook was particularly problematic and could portend trouble for progressive causes in a Biden White House. And while he sees Mr. Zients’s experience in the health care industry as useful for manag- ing the pandemic response, Mr. Hauser said he was concerned that Mr. Zients could be too ac- commodating to business as vac- cines are rolled out next year. “Dissemination and delivery of the vaccine will be a significant undertaking,” Mr. Hauser said. He added that Mr. Zients understood how to do it, “but whether or not he would be too sympathetic to businesses in management of that power is to be determined.” In a role directing the virus response, which will require coordi- nation across government agen- cies and the private sector, corporate management experience could be an asset. Fred P. Hochberg, who was president of the U.S. Export-Im- port Bank from 2009-17, said that ideological labels evolved over time and that business experience should not be a blemish. “I think Jeff is certainly progressive, but there’s a pragma- tism, a ‘what can we get done to move things forward?’ ” Mr. Hoch- berg said. “In government, it’s about accomplishing things. It’s not just about making a state- ment.”

As Attitudes Shift, Biden Aides’ Business Ties Elicit Concerns as Well as Cheers

By ALAN RAPPEPORT

Jeffrey D. Zients in 2013. Mr. Zients, a co-chairman of the president-elect’s transition team, recently led an investment fund.

CHRISTOPHER GREGORY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A top transition

official is under

scrutiny from the left.

Neither Jon Ossoff nor the Rev.
Raphael Warnock has endorsed
the Green New Deal. But that
hasn’t stopped the Sunrise Move-
ment, the activist climate group
that champions the sweeping cli-
mate change plan, from mobiliz-
ing in force for the two Georgia
Democrats in their high-stakes
runoff races for Senate seats.
The group is aiming to help reg-
ister 10,000 to 20,000 Georgians
who will turn 18 by Jan. 5, the day
of the elections. It has people on
the ground canvassing and drop-
ping off campaign literature. And
while its appeals mention the
threat from climate change, it
does not present the issue as a lit-
mus test.
“Right now, we’re focused on
the bigger picture,” said Shanté
Wolfe, who is leading the Sunrise
Movement’s work in Georgia.
“Our effort is in favor of the great-
er good.”
The furious efforts in Georgia
by the Sunrise Movement and

other progressive groups — on be-
half of two candidates who do not
share their most ambitious policy
goals — reflect the urgency that is
consuming the Democratic Par-
ty’s left flank. Two victories in
Georgia would produce a 50-50 tie
in the Senate, giving Democrats
control of the chamber because
Kamala Harris would cast
tiebreaking votes as vice presi-
dent.
Without Democratic control,
progressive lawmakers, activists
and their grass-roots supporters
worry that they will not be able to
achieve even a pared-down ver-
sion of their policy wish list for the
country.
But they also understand that
for decades Georgia has been a
Republican stronghold with a
large number of conservative vot-
ers, and that their efforts there
need to be modulated. President-
elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the
state, many Democrats point out,
with a moderate agenda that tem-
pered the rhetoric and policy
goals of the left. Mr. Biden, Mr.
Warnock and Mr. Ossoff do not
support “Medicare for all,” an-
other priority of the party’s left
wing.
Ms. Wolfe said the Sunrise
Movement had tried to adjust its
messaging for a state like Georgia
by “making sure that we localize
the Green New Deal in a way that

resonates with Southerners.” For instance, canvassers are empha- sizing how climate change affects the air that Georgians breathe, she said. Other groups are also pouring money and resources into the state. The Progressive Change Cam- paign Committee has already raised $386,000 for the two Demo- cratic candidates. MoveOn, a progressive group, hopes to mobilize many of its 250,000 members in Georgia, and more nationwide, to canvass and phone bank in the state. Our Revolution, the political organization that spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is currently con- tacting its 50,000 member house- holds in the state to encourage them to request mail ballots. “We are moving heaven and earth and pointing all of our resources as much as we can to help us win those two seats in Geor- gia,” said Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat who will be sworn into the next Congress. Mr. Bowman said he spoke recently with Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the Georgia gover- nor’s race in 2018 and is widely credited with voter turnout initia- tives that helped flip Georgia blue this year, to see how he could support her efforts. And he said that he and other progressives in the House — including “the Squad,” a now-growing group that began with four congresswomen of color — were strategizing about how to help in Georgia. “Georgia is not New York. It’s not California. It has its own culture,” Mr. Bowman said. “But it’s a culture rooted in justice for all, and we just want to make sure we support that initiative as much as we can, as representatives from other parts of the country.” Amid deepening ideological fault lines among Democrats over messaging and electoral strategy — divisions that have burst into the open as the party takes stock of its painful losses down the ballot — the two Senate runoff elections will also be a test case for whether progressives can balance their broad calls for change with the realities of campaigning in a once reliably Republican state. Defeating two Republican in- cumbents, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, will be no easy task for Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock. Still, the competitive- ness of the races, and the progressive focus on Georgia, under- scores the political evolution oc- curring in the state. Mr. Biden was the first Demo- cratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in

And though Georgia does
not have a reputation now as a
hotbed of liberalism, some organ-

izers and strategists inside and outside Georgia contend that it is becoming increasingly receptive to left-leaning ideas. While many of the Democrats who won in Georgia last month were more moderate, including Carolyn Bourdeaux, who flipped a longtime Republican House dis- trict in metropolitan Atlanta, sev- eral local progressive candidates won farther down the ballot. They include Nicole Love Hendrickson, who became the first Black person elected as commission chair- woman of Gwinnett County, in

suburban Atlanta. Progressives see Georgia not as a one-off endeavor in 2020 but as a top target of their efforts for years to come. “Is Georgia a Tier 1 state? Is Georgia a progressive state? Are we building a new Georgia? Yes, yes and yes,” said Britney Whaley, a political strategist with the Working Families Party, a progressive group that has been op- erating in Georgia since 2018 and has endorsed Mr. Warnock. Nse Ufot, the chief executive of the New Georgia Project, which

was founded by Ms. Abrams and has registered hundreds of thou- sands of new voters, said there was still “an obsession with moving white moderate men back into the Democratic Party.” But that thinking was mistaken, she said, even — and perhaps especially — in Georgia. “It just feels like people do not get, and do not understand, what it takes to win and what it takes to win in the South,” she said. “We can contribute to this progressive majority — it’s just that it can’t be race-blind. It can’t be race neu-

tral.” There are plenty of signs that suggest liberals still face an uphill battle in Georgia. Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator and progressive standard-bearer, lost Georgia’s Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton by more than 40 percentage points in 2016. (Mr. Sanders had dropped out of the race by the time Georgia held its primary in June this year.) Mr. Biden beat President Trump in Georgia by making significant gains among affluent, col- lege-educated and older voters in the suburbs around Atlanta, according to a New York Times Up- shot analysis of the results; at the same time, the Black share of the electorate fell to its lowest point since 2006. Those findings indicate that Democrats must still depend on the support of traditionally conservative voters to win statewide — rather than turning out a progressive majority led by young voters and nonwhite voters. Even if the Democrats win the two Georgia Senate seats, progressives will still face significant barriers to passing their policies. It is unlikely that all 50 Democrat- ic senators would get behind a left-wing policy proposal like expanding the Supreme Court, or that Mr. Biden would support it. Representative Ro Khanna of California, the first vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the Georgia races were “about the here and now.” “We understand the stakes, and every progressive group that I know of has made that a priority with the same passion and deter- mination as winning back the presidency,” he said. But he also said the horizon for the movement was long. Even if Democrats fail to win control of the Senate, he said, progressives should try to pass an agenda in the House that includes less transfor- mative policy goals than Medi- care for all — including raising the minimum wage, forgiving student loan debt and expanding access to Medicare. “I don’t think that their outcome should determine the boldness of our agenda,” Mr. Khanna said, re- ferring to the Georgia runoffs. “The mistake would be to pull back.” For the party’s left wing, the po- tential limits on a progressive agenda have not dampened the resolve. In a fund-raising email last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts hailed Mr. Bi- den’s success as proof that “the path to victory in Georgia is clearer than ever.” Then she issued a call to arms: “Democrats can win these two Senate races too — and we must.”

With Senate at Stake in Georgia, Progressives Focus on ‘Bigger Picture’

By SYDNEY EMBER

Though they don’t support some progressive ideas, Jon Ossoff, above, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, below second from left, are being supported by liberal groups in their Senate campaigns.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mobilizing on behalf

of two Democrats,

despite differences.

The New York Times - USA (2020-12-02)

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources