West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has for years walked a moderate line—but is there still space for old centrists?
Charleston, West Virginia, is about 360 winding miles from Washington. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) visits the city often when in the state that he’s represented in the U.S. Senate for a dozen years.
Charleston is familiar, friendly turf. Raised in the Alleghenies near Pennsylvania, Mr. Manchin is a well-known face in the state’s capital, where he worked and lived as a state lawmaker, secretary of state, and governor for more than three decades.
During an Oct. 11–13 swing through Charleston, he was celebrated at an Amtrak station renovated with grants he secured; at a metal-stamping plant founded with economic development initiatives he enacted as governor; and at an annual veterans motorcycle fundraiser ride that he’s headlined for years.
Mr. Manchin’s local legacies are built into bolts and bricks, solid as steel, and part of the physical landscape. It’s the type of familiar, friendly turf where a 76-year-old veteran of a half-century of Hill-Topper and Capitol Hill politics could retire to—or launch an underdog presidential campaign from.
The odds of such an insurgency gaining steam, or even much notice, are incalculable in a changed political landscape that’s no longer the familiar, friendly domain he plied between party hedges for years.
Mr. Manchin’s middle road is now a barbed-wire ribbon on a divided highway.
Beyond Charleston, even within West Virginia, Mr. Manchin’s stature is as fuzzy as is his status as the Senate’s most “conservative” Democrat, a cross-aisle back-slapper whose deal-making days are numbered.
The last of West Virginia’s once-dominant Democrats and a champion of bipartisanship, he’s both anachronism and antithesis: arguably the Senate’s single-most critical vote, cast by a presumed lame duck, possibly campaigning for his seat—or, maybe something beyond—in 2024.
No Country for Old Centrists
The make-a-deal pliability that made Mr. Manchin a crafty centrist with de facto thumbs-up, thumbs-down veto power over both parties’ agendas for years—often cast after dramatic deliberative pauses and media speculation—fostered his outsized ascendancy in national affairs.
By John Haughey
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