OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: An agenda overshot


The progressives are mad at, and insulting of, West Virginian Joe Manchin, of course.

They're saying the center-right Democratic senator from a deep-red Trump state is corrupted by personal coal holdings and big corporate donations.

The Biden White House essentially called Manchin a liar who told his old friend the president that he was close to agreeing and then went on Fox, of all places, to say he wasn't ever going to support this $2 trillion progressive wish list that Biden and Democratic congressional leaders had strung themselves out on.

I don't know if Manchin is corrupt. I don't know if he misled Joe Biden or lied to him outright.

I don't know anything firsthand about Manchin except that Mike Beebe once gave me his email address and I copied to him a column I'd written, after which he replied pleasantly if perfunctorily.

Well, I know four things:

• Manchin is the only Democrat imaginable who could get elected to the U.S. Senate from West Virginia, which is possibly worse politically than Arkansas, which is saying something.

• Losing him in the Democratic caucus would make Mitch McConnell majority leader, which would be the worst thing for Democrats next to Kevin McCarthy becoming House speaker or Donald Trump becoming president.

• He has worked on reasonable compromises with the left, such as the pending voting-rights bill that the Democrats aren't going to be able to pass.

• He never said publicly anything on the Build Back Better bill other than that he was concerned about its size and wasn't ready to vote for it.

When the bill came over from the House weeks ago, Manchin said it wasn't the document he'd be working from because it was too big. He expressed concern about inflation, deficits and cost-estimating gimmicks such as supposedly phasing out programs that progressives didn't really intend to let expire.

What Manchin told Fox on Sunday was not distantly different from that.

He didn't say he wouldn't join Democrats in a huddled retreat to write anew with fewer pages, fewer dollars and consensus.

There are things a moderate opinion-writer in Arkansas can see because he lives in a conservative-run bubble where liberal interest groups are small and weak. It's different for blue states where liberal constituents are plentiful, strong and demanding because at last they have even tenuous control of the White House and the Congress.

Down here, it's clear that Democrats can never get a functioning national majority unless they get back some reasonable center-leaning conservatives. That makes Manchin's center-right leverage an important positive thing.

But, in blue America, it seems just as clear that Democrats can never get a functioning national majority unless they keep the base pleased and motivated.

That makes Manchin's center-right leverage detestable.

I'm writing from Arkansas a few blocks from where a Republican-overrun Legislature exists less from its own merit than from the powerfully alienating rural-American fear of perceived national Democratic liberalism.

From this perspective, I've written confidently that Biden went the wrong way, choosing to champion the left and finesse the center, when he should have done the inverse.

The proof is in the outcome, which is that what Biden chose didn't work.

He went all-in for the progressive agenda, all out of proportion to the 50-50 Senate.

The only way he could hope to pass the all-in progressive agenda was to avoid the 60-vote filibuster and use the once-only option of budget reconciliation. What that meant was that every liberal senator with a pet program demanded that program's inclusion in this one-shot budget-reconciliation tome.

Biden's centerpiece legislation thus became defined only by disjointed vastness, not anything on which the spin doctors could find a clear message with which to persuade Americans who were worried about other things, mainly gasoline prices and supply chains.

Then, when Manchin initially made clear months ago that he wasn't going along with anything so vast, progressives trimmed, but not by programs. They trimmed by the supposed expiration or drawn-out financing of programs.

They never did the hard legislative work of prioritizing to pare the bill to the few popular consensus-backed items, which they could have passed by now, giving them not only covid relief and bipartisan infrastructure to boast of, but also social-spending advancements--modest, yes, but real.

So, now they are back where I'm saying they should have started--to the ground floor to find programs that can get 50 Senate votes and for which they can fashion a clear broader message.

It's better to accomplish less competently than to hold out for more incompetently.

Biden should have led rather than followed. He should have told the impractical progressives to get mad at Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and him, but that he'd get them something rather than nothing. That would have been presidential.

There may still exist a slightly ajar window for modest Democratic competence, unless that's now oxymoronic.


John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.



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