DEAD CENTER

The former U.S. senator addresses a polarized politics.

Manchin, former governor of and U.S. senator from West Virginia, entered the Senate in 2010 after winning a special election following the death of Robert Byrd. He went as a Democrat, the party of choice among working-class West Virginians for years—until, that is, what he calls the “war on coal” began and the polity flipped to the GOP overnight. Writes Manchin, “there were enough reasons to change my political affiliation to Republican right then and there.” He might just as well have, for, as he writes, he killed President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, refused to do away with the Republican-favoring filibuster, and, as he proudly writes, enjoyed “an open line of communication” with President Trump, adding, “I spoke to him more in the first two years of his presidency than I did to President Obama during all eight years of his time in office.” Moreover, Manchin sounds Republican, calling climate change “the new religion” and writing of his salad days, “Back then, getting help from the government was seen as a last resort, not a way of life.” He also dismisses the Democratic Party’s “woke ideology, DEI mandates, and other social agendas.” (He does allow that “I have watched the Republican Party lose itself to one man.”) Before leaving the Senate, Manchin switched his affiliation to independent, and, he asserts, the “fastest-growing” party in the country today is “no party at all.” Manchin proposes a number of reforms to reclaim the middle, some of them sensible (undoing the Citizens United dark-money regime, banning gerrymandering) and some unlikely, such as his effort to prohibit a sitting senator from campaigning against another sitting senator.

Manchin’s middle-of-the-road approach will appeal to those steering to the right.