Manchin shows how politics is meant to work

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has shown us how American politics is supposed to work. He’s being tarred and feathered by the far left for spoiling its effort to shove a “transformative” singleparty bill down a divided nation’s throat. But Manchin represents the will of most of the country. While individual items in the Build Back Better may appear popular, polls show a public increasingly nervous about Washington’s spending and its impact on inflation. These moderates represent a demographic both the current president and his predecessor seemed to ignore.

Despite President Donald Trump’s claim to be an outsider and dealmaker and all of President Joe Biden’s talk about unity in his inaugural address, both took turns trying to box out the other party, largely to the country’s detriment. Manchin has now called out that derisive impulse by throwing cold water on the Democrats’ plans to pass the massive social policy and climate bill all by themselves. Manchin may be a pariah to some, but that courage suggests that he has illuminated the way forward.

We can wonder why both presidents so quickly abandoned the collaborative politics Manchin exemplifies and instead reverted to the partisan norm. Perhaps they’d never intended to reach across the aisle, and they simply knew raising the flag polled well in national contests. Perhaps they simply succumbed to pressure from their partisan allies in Congress. But, in the end, the reasons matter less than the impact. Trump’s tenure shook the electorate’s faith in the core of our democracy. If Biden continues on the same trajectory — if he fails to learn the lesson Manchin is teaching — he will leave the country as angry and divided as Trump left it one year ago. We must do better.

In part, that means we as citizens need to put more pressure on our individual members of Congress. Trump’s ability to do bipartisan tax reform (as opposed to the single-party bill that ultimately passed in 2017) was likely stymied by Republicans on Capitol Hill who would have argued at the time that, because the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, he was squandering an opportunity to press their conservative advantage. By the same token, I am quite sure that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer would have bristled if Biden had chosen to reach across the aisle and negotiate with Republicans from the outset on Build Back Better and they frankly didn’t seem interested in real negotiations with Manchin.

But if Congress is an obstacle, neither president should be let off the hook. We need our commanders-in-chief to display the mettle that defines true leadership. That’s what both men promised to do during their campaigns. And to the degree that they have failed to follow through, we should call them out.

I will admit to being surprised by Biden’s decision to steer away from the bipartisan path to Build Back Better. When I met him personally in 1980, he made a real impression. I was taken with his soaring rhetoric about working across the aisle. America used to boast leaders who maintained strong ties with their counterparts in the other party. But we can’t ignore the reality. President Harry Truman left office less popular than he might have had he done what was good for the Democratic Party. Instead, Truman worked with staunch Republicans on a containment policy toward the Soviet Union that many Democrats at the time opposed.

Bob Dole, a war hero and distinguished Senate leader who died this month, was a committed Republican, but was the driving force behind the landmark bipartisan Americans With Disabilities Act, and blunted the worst impulses of the right-wing “Republican Revolution” in Congress in 1995, working to end a government shutdown.

The problem today is that the pull to the extremes in evidence on Capitol Hill so frequently overpowers the desire for collaboration around the country. When voters consistently cast ballots for candidates who promise to break the country out of the insipid push for tribal partisanship, and then those candidates fail to follow through, the public is bound to lose faith in government. And yet, here we are, again.

Some of our leaders — figures like Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who revived talks with the White House on infrastructure this year after earlier talks failed, and Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, the only House Democrat to oppose BBB — understand what’s at stake. But to restore our democracy, more of our leaders need not only to pay lip service to bipartisanship, but to put bipartisanship on display in earnest. America’s problems are solvable, but not by either party on its own. We need figures in Washington who are willing, capable and committed to working across the aisle. Beyond paying lip service to bipartisanship, we need real leadership in the Oval Office.