{"id":443326,"date":"2021-12-22T01:32:38","date_gmt":"2021-12-22T01:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=381728"},"modified":"2021-12-22T01:32:38","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T01:32:38","slug":"joe-manchin-for-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/12\/22\/joe-manchin-for-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Manchin for President"},"content":{"rendered":"
When Lyndon B. Johnson<\/u> took over leadership of the Senate Democratic caucus in the early 1950s, anybody who suggested that he would one day become the most consequential elected champion of civil rights in nearly\u00a0100 years would have been laughed out of the smoke-filled room.<\/p>\n
Yet just a few years later, the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of the arch-segregationist and white supremacist\u00a0Sen. Richard Russell had broken with his mentor and muscled through the 1957 Civil Rights Act, followed later, as president, by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. None of that meant Johnson stopped being racist<\/a>; rather, he saw where the future was heading.<\/p>\n Johnson correctly recognized that segregationist politics had taken him as far as they could, and in order to rise to become a national figure, he needed to flip and become an ally of the civil rights movement. Johnson\u2019s genius lay in his ability to see changing political landscapes and the potential for new coalitions embedded within them\u00a0\u2014 and to shape himself to be the one at the center of that new coalition.<\/p>\n Johnson could easily have clung to segregationist politics and continued winning (and stealing<\/a>) elections the rest of his life as a steadfast champion of the New Deal. Sen. Joe Manchin\u2019s capacity to continue winning elections as a centrist, pro-business Democrat in West Virginia is less assured, but Manchin appears to believe that he can continue to hold on by making the defense of the coal industry\u00a0\u2014 a business in which he is not just a referee but also a player<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 central to his politics. In objecting to the Build Back Better Act, Manchin argued that its investments in clean energy were pushing the economy too quickly away from fossil fuels, and he has objected to multiple specific provisions that he believes are unfair to coal.<\/p>\n\n Ironically, a path remarkably similar to the one that opened up for Johnson is now laid out before Manchin, but Manchin\u2019s narrow view of himself and his potential means that he\u2019s unlikely to see it. The imaginary ceiling he sees just above his head is unusual for a senator\u00a0\u2014 a creature that, as the adage goes, wakes up and sees a president in the mirror\u00a0\u2014 and for a man who incessantly pines for the glory days of his governorship, when he had genuine executive authority, the thing he tells colleagues he misses the most. Yet he doesn\u2019t miss it enough to see his path toward gaining it at the national level.<\/p>\n If Manchin had more political imagination and more confidence behind his own ambition, he might see that breaking with coal and austerity is his only path out of his own political death spiral\u00a0\u2014 and could even position him for the presidency.<\/p>\n LBJ and Manchin<\/u> came up under similar circumstances, both the sons of small-time rural politicians. Johnson\u2019s father, who served in the statehouse in Austin, Texas, went bust twice in the cotton business, with Johnson driven to redeem the family name. Manchin\u2019s grandfather and father were both mayors of Farmington, West Virginia, the former a grocer and the latter the owner of a carpet store. His uncle A. James Manchin also got into politics but resigned in disgrace from the position of state treasurer. It didn\u2019t dampen the hope of Manchin\u2019s father to build a political dynasty modeled after the Kennedy family. The connection was personal: The Manchins served as West Virginia “sherpas” for\u00a0President John F. Kennedy’s\u00a01960 primary victory there.<\/p>\n Manchin is a completely different senator\u00a0from\u00a0Johnson, even if their backgrounds and politics betray similarities. Johnson peered at the Senate, divined its nature, and bent it to his will by building momentary political coalitions others hadn\u2019t seen. He was also operating in a more fluid Senate, in the middle of a political realignment that produced the ossified chamber Manchin entered in 2010. Manchin peered at the Senate, saw a chamber divided by party, and went to work using his personal amiability to overcome the structural obstacles to his cherished bipartisanship. While Manchin fought the partisan realignment and flailed helplessly, Johnson leaned into it and rode it to national power. Manchin\u2019s approach to the Senate\u00a0\u2014 use the filibuster to try to reverse time and bring back the allegedly halcyon days of the old upper chamber\u00a0\u2014 is much closer to Russell\u2019s than to Johnson\u2019s.<\/p>\n