“Same nonsense that Manchin has been talking about for a year,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said of Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) concerns about inflation. Sanders added later, “In my humble opinion, you know, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”
This exchange, which came Sunday during an interview on ABC’s This Week, just shows how far from reality Sanders is. For one thing, it would be an act of cruelty to Biden to enact his agenda at this point. The last thing the economy needs at a time of 9% inflation is another multitrillion-dollar spending package financed by borrowing. The last thing it needs is even higher energy prices thanks to fantasy-land energy policies of the environmental Left. Either of these supposed accomplishments would surely cost Biden his majorities in both houses of Congress, to say nothing of his party’s fortunes down-ballot.
But beyond that, it’s also wrongheaded to focus on Manchin as the culprit for Biden’s failures.
First of all, depending on which agenda item we’re discussing, there are 51 or 52 senators who oppose Biden’s agenda, not just one. That is not Manchin’s fault, it is the fault of President Biden’s narrow, no-coattails victory in November 2020.
President Donald Trump, you may recall, won the Electoral College and the White House in 2016 based on a margin of just 77,744 votes in three key states. By that standard — the one that counts — Biden won an even narrower victory in 2020 based on a combined margin of only about 44,000 votes in three key states.
That same day, Democrats actually lost ground in state-level elections, dropping two state legislative chambers and one governorship. Democrats in the U.S. House saw their comfortable 36-seat majority shrink down to an uncomfortable nine-seat edge. As for the Senate, only Georgia’s peculiar general election runoff rules saved Biden by allowing Jon Ossoff to win a seat in January instead of losing it in November. This is how Biden, by the skin of his fingernails, obtained the current 50-50 Senate tie, which Biden’s vice president can break in party-line votes.
In short, Biden came into office with no ideological mandate. It made a lot of sense at the time. After four chaotic years, voters opted for the man who had run as a centrist Democrat, prepared to return to normalcy. Sure, Biden was going to be a Democrat, but he was going to represent the sane wing of his party — to manage a closely divided nation based on political consensus.
Biden is now the most unpopular president in history precisely because he ignored this. He arrogantly behaves now as if he won a clear mandate in 2020 to make enormous changes. He jumped to impose environmentalist restrictions on fossil fuels; he has signed massive spending increases, causing devastating inflation; he has proposed further spending increases; he has proposed massive tax increases; he has deliberately sabotaged the operational control of the Mexican border that had been hard-won under Trump; he has pushed for legislation that would permanently cement permanent everywhere-any-time abortions; he has at times threatened to knock down checks against his own power, such as the filibuster and the nine-justice Supreme Court.
And, of course, the foreign policy failures, though mostly nonideological in nature, have been epic. Biden’s numbers began to tumble with his disastrous, chaotic, lethal failure in Afghanistan, and he has only fallen further in the time since. None of this is Manchin’s fault. Indeed, Manchin is probably saving Biden from himself right now.
This is the true reason Biden cannot accomplish anything. Any Democrat who wants to survive this fall understands the need to put as much distance between himself and this doddering old fool as possible. Biden’s approval numbers show his brand to be politically toxic beyond anything Trump or Barack Obama faced in their first midterms. Approval-wise, he is roughly on par with where President George W. Bush was in July 2006, after Katrina put his presidency on the ropes ahead of his disastrous second midterm.
Either way, Sanders is in no position to blame Manchin.
