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.