There isn’t a person in this country right now who doesn’t have an opinion on the words and actions of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
In fact, it goes beyond that. There aren’t many people who don’t have an opinion on what Manchin might say or do regarding a laundry list of items pending in Congress.
The centrist-Democrat senator in an evenly split Senate, which only has a tiebreaker margin for the Democrats because of Vice President Kamala Harris, is the key to any major policy moving through Congress. Manchin, a former West Virginia governor who has been in the Senate since 2010 and flirted with returning home to run for the state’s top post again, often bemoaned the partisan stalemates in Washington and an overall feeling of helplessness.
That was then.
Now, if anyone wants anything, they have to take Manchin’s temperature on the issue, and it’s always going to be less than what his Democratic Party colleagues want, and more than his fellow Republican senators will give.
Manchin’s finally where he wants to be, but you have to wonder if it’s worth it.
West Virginia’s senior senator sat down with the Gazette-Mail Editorial Board on Tuesday. There are all kinds of things I could get into from that, but a point he kept returning to that stood out to me is just how much he’s been hounded by the press, by constituents, by lobbyists, by everyone who wants him to do what they want, or at least wants to know what he’ll do.
It’s an unusual circumstance and, in today’s political climate, it seemed at times frightening to Manchin — if not to him personally, then to his family and the process of democracy.
It can’t be a lot of fun to have every waking moment occupied by someone in your ear, banging on your door or, in one instance, kayaking up to your houseboat with a megaphone. I’m not downplaying those folks’ concerns but, for Manchin, it must feel like being one of the Beatles in the 1960s, except everyone is angry with you for one reason or another. They don’t want your autograph. They want you to sit there and listen, and some pretty much expect you to have adopted their viewpoint by the time they’re finished.
But that’s the job. Manchin, setting himself up as one of the few members of Congress agreeable to negotiation and input beyond the party line, is reaping the whirlwind. Some say he loves the attention, and that might be true to a certain extent, but I doubt his dream scenario of being a facilitator in the Senate is playing out how he imagined.
Honestly, it’s reshaped his home state, too. Manchin can’t return to West Virginia and lay low. Political action committees are spending millions on ads in the state in an effort to rile up constituents so they’ll contact Manchin and let him know what they want him to do on everything from election reform to infrastructure to the child tax credit. And these ads aren’t very nuanced. They focus on things like abortion or gun control, which often have nothing to do with the issue at hand but are designed to go for the anger stab to the amygdala. I wonder how many calls Manchin or his staff have fielded where the person on the line is so twisted into knots of rage, what they’re trying to say is unintelligible.
Still, whether it’s fair, this is where Manchin positioned himself. Because of his sudden relevance, he’s going to continue to get all of this heat for as long as it lasts. People are going to start caring about things like his financial interests, and how that might influence his decision-making. For instance, on Tuesday Manchin insisted that the millions of dollars of stock he owns in his coal brokerage firm, which is in a blind trust, has nothing to do with his protection of the coal industry. That might be completely true, but questions like that, rarely discussed since Manchin entered politics nearly 30 years ago, are going to start popping up.
It still seemed almost bewildering to Manchin when he talked about it. After all, he isn’t some COVID-19 conspiracy theorist or one of the shameful members of Congress carrying water for the former president’s lie that he won an election he lost. Manchin’s a middle-of-the-road Democrat. But he’s now on the big stage in a bizarre time, and that brings a lot with it.
It reminds me of an exchange with one of the best professors I ever had in college, who was training me to be a journalist, while often saying he’d never enter the field again. When I asked him about this seeming contradiction, he explained, “I’d like to keep what little anonymity I have left.” That was around 1998, when the world seemed a lot bigger.
These days, if you want to do big things, especially in the realm of politics, there are going to be millions of people who disagree with you, and they might not even know why, but they’re going to let you know how they feel. It’s not a lot of fun, but it’s part of the price of public service.
