Jeff Zients, the former White House’s Covid-19 response czar, speaks during a press briefing at the White House where they spoke about a pause in issuing the Johnson & Johnson Janssen Covid-19 vaccine on April 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C.(Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Since 2016, the Democratic Party has moved steadily to the left. Even tried and true moderates like Joe Biden have adapted to this new reality with greater government intervention in the economy than was contemplated in the eras of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
But centrist Democrats still sometimes revert to their bad old habits. We saw two signs of this recently, with New York Governor Kathy Hochul nominating a conservative judge despite the opposition of a wide swath of her own party and Joe Biden tapping Jeffrey Zients, a notorious corporate predator, to be the White House chief of staff.
Alexander Sammon wrote about Hochul’s blunder at Slate. He joins The Time of Monsters to discuss both of these inexplicable cases.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.