CHARLESTON, West Virginia — Sen. Joe Manchin had just finished taking his umpteenth question about whether he would vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster and has answered for the umpteenth time that he would not do either.
I ask if he thought it would help if he had “I will not nuke the filibuster” tattooed across his forehead. He smiles, barely, then says, “If I thought they would not ask again …” and then his voice trails off. He has been saying the same thing for more than six months.
And if you have covered him long enough, you know he keeps his word.
If you’ve spent any time in West Virginia, you know your word is your honor.
Manchin has just finished telling the story about how he met his wife Gayle and about her profound influence on his life. The story begins with him as a lowly freshman football player at West Virginia University in 1965, and the freshman team, which wasn’t allowed to travel with the varsity, would gather supposedly to listen on the radio broadcast of the varsity game. Instead, the players often just enjoyed music and dancing, oblivious to the play-by-play.
“We were lucky to find out the next day if we won the game,” he said.
Manchin loved to dance; his sister Janet taught him how to practice everything from the twirl to the cha-cha to the swing. “And I was dancing with a girl,” he explained. “Very nice person, I don’t even remember her name. And thank God I don’t. But anyway, the poor girl she’s going one way, I’m going another, and I look over on the dance floor, and there was this pretty little girl, and boy, could she dance.”
Manchin said her dance partner was not a good dancer, so Manchin calculated that her dance partner and his dance partner, who also danced poorly, would be better suited for each other — and besides that, he just really wanted to ask that other girl to dance.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t wait for the end of the song after I saw her, so I made it about halfway through, and I went over to this guy and said, ‘Look, I gotta tell you something. I’m dancing with a girl who can’t take her eyes off you. She wants to dance with you so bad, and she’s afraid to tell you. So I had to come over and tell you for her.’ He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yep.’”
Manchin started dancing with the pretty little girl whose name was Gayle; two years later, they were married.
“In our senior year, we had a mine explosion in my hometown of Farmington, killed 68 of my friends, my uncle, my classmates. One week later, my father’s store burned down to the ground. I came home to work on trying to get things started again, and I had no intention of ever going back to school. I had purpose, and that purpose was helping my family, helping my community. But Gayle kept saying, ‘Joe, you gotta go back and get your education. If you don’t, you’ll never do it. If you don’t go back now, you’ll never do it.’”
It took nearly a year of nudging, but he went back, and when he did, he went with a vengeance to finish: “I took 27 hours of credit every semester until I graduated …”
His voice starts to crack; he struggles to hold his composure.
“And it was …” he says, then stops, and the control he held gives way to tears.
“She pushed me. She pushed me, and if it wasn’t for her … her commitment, I would not be here today.”
If you want to know who Manchin is, he has just let you in.
Since the moment the Democrats won the runoff elections in Georgia in January of this year, Manchin has been the center of attention in Washington for opposing changes in Senate rules that would advance legislation with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.
In turn, he has become a fixation for those who lobby, host dinner parties, or have made government a career in the nation’s capital — a place that is really a Democratic company town no matter who is in power. He has emerged as this thing they cannot comprehend, a man who really places country before party.
When I asked November of last year if he was committed to preserving the filibuster no matter what, he said unequivocally, “Under no circumstances would I support ending the filibuster.”
Yet since January of this year, thousands of stories have been written by hundreds of reporters asking, when Manchin says no to repealing filibuster, if that no is a hard no or soft no, or if no really meant never. No one seems to remember this is the same guy who had a pithy answer in 2017 about his own reelection chances when critics wanted him to commit to Democratic policy points.
“I don’t give a s***, you understand? I just don’t give a s***,” Manchin said, to the Charleston Gazette-Mail about being pressured into taking positions he disagrees with just to win an election. “Don’t care if I get elected, don’t care if I get defeated, how about that? If they think because I’m up for election, that I can be wrangled into voting for s*** that I don’t like and can’t explain, they’re all crazy.”
The unwillingness to accept no in Washington is one of the many differences between people who live and work there and the people here in West Virginia. When someone says he isn’t doing something, it means he won’t do it.
In Washington, even if politicians or lobbyists tell you they aren’t doing something, it remains likely they can be persuaded otherwise by day’s end.
Since last weekend, when it finally sunk in that Manchin would not nuke the filibuster, he has been called a racist, a Jim Crow enabler, a white supremacist (by a reporter for the Atlantic), blamed for untold suffering and death on Twitter, and had his intellect questioned by one of the top Democratic spokeswomen in the Senate.
Even President Joe Biden gave him shade. But Manchin still hasn’t changed his mind.
To understand Manchin, you need to understand his state and his family: no-nonsense characters who governed pragmatically and have never been afraid to call out power when it fails its citizenry.
His father Joe and his grandfather Joe both served as mayor of Farmington, his uncle, A. James Manchin, was also a politician, a colorful one who served as a delegate, state treasurer, and secretary of state. The career of today’s senator, Joe Manchin III, started at the bottom when he ran and won a delegate seat. He then ran and won a state Senate seat, lost a governor’s primary, won his first statewide election for secretary of state, ran for governor again and this time won, won that seat again, and has run and won for the U.S. Senate three times, albeit with a mere plurality in 2018.
When he runs, he does so not by running as a Washington Democrat but as a West Virginia Democrat. What does that mean? It means he doesn’t just shake hands but sits and talks with his constituents, even to the consternation of his aides. In sum, he is as accessible as a state representative: He rides a motorcycle, loves to fish, can play a mean game of horseshoes, and knows every inch of his state.
The other question he is asked more than once a week is if he will change parties. That answer is still no, folks, but whether he will run for this seat again, he says he is not sure. “I have no idea. I got four years. That’s a long time. Let’s see how this works out this next two years, I’ll tell you then.”
He knows if he doesn’t run, he is likely to be the last Democrat to hold that seat for a very long time, a significance that is lost on most reporters and Democrats in Washington.
When he ran and won for Senate in 2010, almost every member of congressional delegation with the exception of then-congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito was a Democrat and the majorities in the state Legislature were also held by Democrats.
Today, he is the exception and the last man standing for his party.
“There aren’t that many Democrats left who represent majority rural voters; that voice is needed in Washington for the party,” he said.
“My position right now is not what everyone thinks it is, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” he said while amid a crowd of constituents. “But you’ve got to be who you are. And I’ve said this, the people here, my friends, they can look in your eye and see your soul. They know if you’re a fake or not.”
