Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Are Right to Resist the Democrats’ Agenda

J oe Biden won the 2020 election because he understood that Twitter was not real life, and that Americans disagree profoundly about matters of national import. Joe Biden has become disastrously unpopular as quickly as he has because he has forgotten that Twitter is not real life, and that Americans disagree profoundly about matters of national import. If Biden’s tenure in the White House is to be saved from imminent disaster, it will be because enough members of the Democratic Party — two, in particular — remembered that Twitter is not real life and that Americans disagree profoundly about matters of national import, and because they forced the president squarely back into the real world.

After all the Sturm und Drang, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are looking pretty savvy.

Since the Senate convened in January, Senator Manchin’s actions have tracked almost perfectly with the wishes of the West Virginians he represents — which is one reason that those voters continue to like Manchin fine, while strongly disliking President Biden and his team. As recent polling from the state shows, West Virginians are overwhelmingly in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin helped put together, but are vehemently opposed to the gargantuan “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill toward which Manchin has been notably noncommittal. Like Manchin, West Virginians are concerned about the prospect of inflation, and they are not especially receptive to the administration’s preposterous claim that yet another multi-trillion-dollar binge will be just the thing to make it go away. Why is Manchin dragging his feet on the president’s agenda? The question answers itself.

In purple Arizona, meanwhile, Kyrsten Sinema seems to be the only elected Democrat who is aware of the challenges that lie ahead of her and her party. It is often blithely asserted that Sinema’s approval numbers are being dragged down in Arizona because she is an “obstructionist” bent on torpedoing the Democratic agenda, and yet the skeptical Sinema is actually slightly more popular (42 percent approval) than is her rubber-stamp colleague, Mark Kelly (41 percent). The conventional wisdom holds that moderates such as Sinema ought to vote with the party at all costs, because they will be the first to go in an electoral wave. But there is a counterpoint to this approach, and her name is Susan Collins of Maine. In 2017, Collins helped kill the GOP’s Obamacare-repeal effort, and, three years later, she won reelection, even as her party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was beaten in the state by eleven points. Clearly, Collins grasped that she could offer up a mixed bag of votes — yes on the tax cuts, no on Obamacare repeal, yes on Brett Kavanaugh, no on Amy Coney Barrett — and remain acceptable to enough voters to survive a tough year. Were I a betting man, I’d wager that Sinema has studied that history and that she believes — reasonably enough, I’d say — that Collins’s, not Kelly’s, is the better model to emulate.

Which is to say that, at this stage, a more interesting question than, “Why are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema looking askew at their party’s radicalism?” is: “Why isn’t everybody else?” We are still one year away from the midterms, and already the Democrats’ political position is utterly disastrous. As Forbes noted last week, the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “which is considered among the most reliable political surveys, found 51% of registered voters leaning Republican on a generic congressional ballot, with just 41% leaning toward Democrats” — a result that “marks by far the biggest lead Republicans have ever held on a congressional ballot in the poll’s history, which has surveyed the issue since 1981.” And well it might be, given that 62 percent of Americans think the party is “out of touch”; that the president’s approval rating is sitting at around 42 percent in the country at large, and at about 33 percent in battleground states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and that, as ABC has observed, 59 percent of voters are concerned that the president hopes to “do too much to increase the size and role of government.”

When asked specific questions about spending — say, “Would you like a pony?” — Americans are far more likely to say “yes” than fiscal conservatives such as myself would like. When those same voters are asked to factor in the costs and the context, however, their tunes are liable to change. If they like, President Biden and his party can continue to insist that their spending plan is popular, and that only intransigence or corruption or stupidity could lead anyone to oppose it. But, if they do, they will miss the forest for the trees, and they will be punished for it. As I write, American debt is at a record level; our deficits are never-ending; our existing safety-net programs are creaking at the seams; and, in a move that nobody could have anticipated even two years ago, we have just spent six trillion dollars fighting COVID-19. It is no doubt inconvenient that this is the backdrop against which the Democrats have assumed unified control of Congress and the White House for the first time a decade, but, as the philosopher once said, that’s life. The electoral future of the Democratic Party hinges on whether it accepts this as a fact, as Senators Manchin and Sinema seem willing to, or tries stupidly to wish it away in the hope that this time things will be different.