By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, April 11, 2022
Rolling Stone has a big,
angsty story today about how terrible Senator Joe Manchin is. The
headline of the offering is “How Joe Manchin Knifed the Democrats — and Bailed
on Saving Democracy,” the tweet promoting it reads, “How Joe Machin
double-crossed Democrats — and torched plans to protect your vote” [sic], and
the tone of the piece follows suit.
The substance, however, does not.
The report’s hinge graf concedes that:
Rolling Stone interviewed
more than 30 key figures inside and outside of Congress to understand how the
most ambitious voting-rights bill in generations and the Democratic Party’s
main policy response to the Jan. 6 insurrection ended in failure. The blame for
this defeat, sources say, lies with multiple parties: Manchin either strung
along his party for months with no intention of actually supporting the reforms
or gave indications to his colleagues that he was on board only to reverse his
position on multiple occasions. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, miscalculated that
if they could flip Manchin, another swing vote, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,
would follow his lead. As for the White House, these sources say, President
Biden — despite saying as a candidate that “one of the first things I’ll do as
president” is restore the Voting Rights Act — never seemed fully committed to
passing voting-rights legislation. When Biden, who had vowed to run an
“FDR-sized presidency,” did inject himself into the negotiations late in the
fight, his contributions did more harm than good.
And yet, as the rest of the piece shows, this isn’t quite
right. Once one strips away the wishful thinking, ignores the indignant
ass-covering, and takes into account the many iterations of “Manchin’s
spokeswoman disputes this characterization” that are peppered around the essay
in regretful parentheses, one comes to the conclusion that the Democrats’ core
problem here was exactly what we suspected all along: That neither Joe Manchin
nor Kyrsten Sinema were ever interested in abolishing or weakening the
filibuster, and that both the president and the Senate Majority Leader decided
to proceed as if that weren’t true. The rest is fluff and intrigue.
As a good example of the Democrats’ delusions, consider
this:
While Manchin remained opposed to
filibuster reform in public, he began making comments in private meetings that
seemed to suggest he was moving closer to yes. In a late-August meeting with a
small group of West Virginia faith leaders, Manchin said that he valued the
filibuster but did not believe preserving the filibuster outweighed protecting
voting rights, according to a person who was briefed on the meeting. (Manchin’s
spokeswoman disputes this characterization.) This was seen as an encouraging
sign — short of a hard commitment, but evidence that Manchin could be moved.
Democrats and outside activists agreed that any talk of “abolishing” or
“weakening” the filibuster would scare off Manchin, so they framed their
lobbying blitz as an effort to “restore the Senate” and make it work better.
In other words: Manchin remained opposed to filibuster
reform in public; Manchin remained opposed to filibuster reform in private; and
yet, for some reason, the Democrats believed that they would be able to change
Manchin’s mind by adopting the sort of transparently duplicitous
marketing-speak that even a child would be able to see through.
Why? Why did they think this? It is possible, I suppose,
that one might be able to trick a low-information voter by refusing to use the
word “weaken” to describe one’s weakening of the filibuster. But Joe Manchin?
The guy whose aim is to defend it? In what universe could that
possibly work?
As for Joe Biden? Well, he’s exactly as ineffective as we
imagined:
When Manchin asked Biden a question
about the history of the filibuster, Biden’s answer was so unconvincing that
Schumer motioned to Sen. Jeff Merkley to intervene and give a more substantive
response, according to multiple witnesses.
Ouch.
Astonishingly enough, the party’s approach to Sinema
seems to have been even worse:
The attempts to win over Sinema had
come in the final stages of the filibuster battle. John LaBombard, who was
Sinema’s top spokesman at the time, says there was much less of an effort to
persuade the Arizona senator to change her mind than there had been with Joe
Manchin, even though Sinema’s vote was just as crucial as Manchin’s in the
final count. LaBombard says he couldn’t escape the impression that Democratic
leadership either took Sinema’s vote for granted or considered her
long-standing opposition to changing the filibuster somehow less sincere or
authentic than Manchin’s. “It would be a mistake on anyone’s part to engage in
any wishful thinking that Sen. Sinema’s policy or tactical positions are
somehow contingent on the positions of other colleagues and are not sincerely
held,” LaBombard says.
Of course, this was exactly what the Democrats thought,
which is why Sinema was eventually forced to make a speech from the floor of
the Senate and make it clear that she wasn’t bluffing.
As it happens, “wishful thinking” has been a good
description of the Democrats’ attitude from the start. It didn’t matter how
many times Manchin and Sinema made their position plain. It didn’t matter how
many times Manu Raju asked about the filibuster, and was told “no.” It didn’t
matter how many unequivocal statements were issued. Still, the party asked,
“so, you’re saying there’s a chance?” Rolling Stone‘s piece would
be much, much more useful if it acknowledged that directly, instead of
ham-fistedly directing blame at the two figures in the drama who were open
about their stances all along. Had the magazine wanted a more accurate headline
and lead graf, it could have done no better than to use this:
“I thought we were there a couple
of times,” Kaine says. “But maybe that was just me.”
Yeah, Tim. It was.
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