Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has shown us how American politics is supposed to work. He’s being tarred and feathered by the far left for spoiling its effort to shove a “transformative” single-party bill down a divided nation’s throat. But Manchin represents the will of most of the country. While individual items in the Build Back Better may appear popular, polls show a public increasingly nervous about Washington’s spending and its impact on inflation. These moderates represent a demographic both the current president and his predecessor seemed to ignore.
Despite President Trump’s claim to be an outsider and dealmaker, and all of President Biden’s talk about unity in his inaugural address, both took turns trying to box out the other party, largely to the country’s detriment. Manchin has now called out that derisive impulse by throwing cold water on the Democrats’ plans to pass the massive social policy and climate bill all by themselves. Manchin may be a pariah to some, but that courage suggests that he has illuminated the way forward.
We can wonder why both presidents so quickly abandoned the collaborative politics Manchin exemplifies and instead reverted to the partisan norm. Perhaps they’d never intended to reach across the aisle, and they simply knew raising the flag polled well in national contests. Perhaps they simply succumbed to pressure from their partisan allies in Congress. But, in the end, the reasons matter less than the impact. Trump’s tenure shook the electorate’s faith in the core of our democracy. If Biden continues on the same trajectory — if he fails to learn the lesson Manchin is teaching — he will leave the country as angry and divided as Trump left it one year ago. We must do better.
In part, that means we as citizens need to put more pressure on our individual members of Congress. Trump’s ability to do bipartisan tax reform (as opposed to the single-party bill that ultimately passed in 2017) was likely stymied by Republicans on Capitol Hill who would have argued at the time that, because the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, he was squandering an opportunity to press their conservative advantage. By the same token, I am quite sure that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer would have bristled if President Biden had chosen to reach across the aisle and negotiate with Republicans from the outset on Build Back Better and they frankly didn’t seem interested in real negotiations with Manchin.
But if Congress is an obstacle, neither president should be let off the hook. We need our commanders-in-chief to display the mettle that defines true leadership. That’s what both men promised to do during their campaigns. And to the degree that they have failed to follow through, we should call them out.
