Why Did Biden Nominate Saule Omarova in the First Place?

S aule Omarova, President Biden’s pick for comptroller of the currency, has withdrawn her nomination after at least five Democratic senators and every Republican senator made it clear that they were unwilling to vote to confirm her to the post.

My question is this: Why the hell was she nominated in the first place?

Seriously, why? What possible reason could Biden have had to make such a peculiar decision? Perhaps he hasn’t noticed yet, but he is not in a particularly good place right now. He is wildly unpopular. He is already seen as last year’s news. He has yet to persuade Congress to pass the core of his policy agenda. His claim to be a moderate is falling apart by the day. His party seems to be on course for a historic drubbing in next year’s midterm elections. And, in spite of it all, he just spent some of his fast-draining political capital trying to put a radical into the currency office. Why?

Almost to a man, the press has decided that Omarova was rejected because she was “born in the Soviet Union.” But unless “socialist” is a race now, her birthplace can be safely assumed to be irrelevant. In fact, Omarova was rejected because she has expressed support for a whole bunch of ideas that were unacceptable not only to the Republican Party, but to at least 10 percent of the Senate’s Democrats, too. In the last few years alone, she had signaled support for a People’s Ledger that would “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it” by having the Federal Reserve take over consumer banking and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy”; expressed a desire to “basically get rid of these carbon financiers” by “starv[ing] them of their source of capital”; and unironically echoed the satirist dril when she tweeted, “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there.” Why did she invite strong opposition? Because ideas matter, and her ideas are absolutely ghastly.

(As should be obvious, genuine exiles from communism do not, as a matter of habit, begin sentences with “Say what you will about old USSR,” or invoke Soviet-style naming conventions such as “The People’s Ledger” in their day jobs.)

Had Joe Biden run on the same platform as, say, Elizabeth Warren, his picking Omarova would at least be comprehensible. But he didn’t. Indeed, as far as we know, none of Omarova’s unusual ideas had so much as occurred to him before this year. Complaining about her withdrawal, Biden described Omarova as “a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system,” who had “deep expertise in financial regulation,” and who would “have brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people.” But there are many, many people in the United States who could be accurately represented this way who do not also give off the impression that they envy the central planners in the Politburo.

The most obvious answer to my question — Why? — is that Joe Biden did not actually pick Omarova himself, but outsourced the decision either to a comrade-adjacent type such as Warren or to a better-red-than-white-and-male identity-essentialist such as . . . well, such as pretty much anyone within the contemporary progressive establishment. One must assume that, at some point, President Biden is going to recognize that nothing good has come from his having handed his administration over to the lunatics and fabulists in his party, and alter course. But for now, he seems happy to take whatever body blows come his way if, by doing so, he can purchase a temporary reprieve from the opprobrium of left-wing Twitter. Those who are upset by this habit would do well to drop their reflexive indignation and ask the obvious instead: What on earth does the man think he is playing at?