Joe Manchin is one of the last moderate Democrats on the national stage. His party is passing him by, and yet he is pretending not to notice.
“I just can’t believe that 72 million people were either that mad or that scared of the Democrat Party to vote for what I consider a very flawed individual,” Manchin said of President Trump in an interview with the New York Times. He later added, “I know why I’m a Democrat. And I know that I’ve never seen the Democrat Party forsake anybody.”
Manchin is describing a Democratic Party that does not currently exist, and he’s smart enough that he should know it. After all, he later says of his vote in favor of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, “I thought there had to be evidence, and I never saw evidence. The country was in a feeding frenzy. And there was no Democrat that was going to buck that. I said, ‘I’m not going to ruin a person’s life because there’s no evidence.’”
Manchin admits that his fellow Democrats, in lockstep, were trying to ruin Kavanaugh’s life without evidence. He also says, “There’s not a member in the Democratic caucus that condones any of this violence or riots or looting,” which is a difficult argument to make when soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris was helping get rioters bailed out as they lit communities on fire.
Manchin seems to be missing what centrist House Democrats already recognized: The liberal wing of the party has become the driver of conversation — a conscious choice made by the Democratic Party. Democrats, including Joe Biden, want to replicate their mistreatment of accused young men on college campuses. Party celebrities like Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are openly in favor of abolishing the police.
Manchin seems to miss the ground shifting below his feet. Between the continued coronavirus lockdowns that are ignored by Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the party’s embrace of the Green New Deal, the Democratic Party has committed to throwing people out of work. The party that hasn’t forsaken anyone watched as rioters looted and burned down businesses and decided that the rioters were the ones worthy of sympathy.
Manchin deserves some praise for standing tall as the last true, reliable moderate Democrat in Congress. But he’s also a smart man, and surely he recognizes that the version of the Democratic Party he is describing no longer exists. Even a victory by supposed centrist Biden can’t mask the reality for long. Democrats are now the party of Harris and Ocasio-Cortez, and they are leaving Manchin behind.
