Manchin in the middle

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Sean Rameswaram: The two most powerful people in Washington, D.C. right now are both named Joe. One's the president. The other is a senator from West Virginia, the most conservative Democrat, the swing vote in the 50-50 Senate. Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin. Senator Manchin. Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin. Okay, roll them, guys. So far, he's outright opposed one Biden cabinet nominee, leading her to withdraw last night. As you heard on the show yesterday, he's a roadblock on the $15 federal minimum wage. And he said he'd never vote to abolish the filibuster. Actually, when asked about it this week, he said, Never. Jesus Christ. What don't you understand about never? Okay, all right, calm down, Joe. We get it. You love the filibuster. Maybe he's just not used to all the attention. He's getting a lot of attention right now in Congress. He was the man of the moment. If we were out in the hallway and there was a reporter around him, they took a beeline right toward him, you know. It's a matter of John Ossoff, Lisa Murkowski, anybody who was near him, they were going for Joe. And the questions that they would ask him, you know, they touch every facet of government, minimum wage, climate change, health disparities. He gets every kind of question. And so he's just like, he's a rock star up there right now.

Sean Rameswaram: Joe Severino is a reporter at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. We did not have any moonshine while we were in D.C. I'll state that on the record. Joe the reporter shadowed Joe the senator in the spotlight just last week. Susan Collins said it best. I interviewed her Friday. She said in the 50-50 Senate, there is no more powerful senator than Joe Manchin. And the role he plays is ever more important because Joe, he's always been the guy in the middle. He's always the guy looking to both sides. What would they need to come to the Senate and let's get an agreement out? And I think that worked for him pretty well here in West Virginia, and it got him into the governor's mansion and into his Senate seat. So that was Joe's brand before he even got there. So now, after about a decade of Joe being in the Senate, he's kind of just got a stranglehold on anything that happens in the Senate. He's the man in the middle on the minimum wage. He's the man in the middle on rent cancellation, anything like that. So, you know, he, before all this, was the figurative man in the middle, but now he's literally the man in the middle.

Joe Severino: Well, help us understand this man in the middle a little bit more. He's from West Virginia. So are you. What's his story? His story is very similar than, you know, a lot of West Virginians, and especially me. You know, our families are from the same part of the boot in Italy, same region. They came to central West Virginia to work in the coal mines because that was the only job that was available when they got here. You know, in my little town, everybody kind of worked in the coal mines, and my father and grandfather had a grocery store and a furniture store. The Manchin family delved into politics at some point up in Marion County, where he's from. You know, politics was a family thing. The 60 campaign changed our family because of John Kennedy making West Virginia the battleground. We're Catholic. Could he break that religious barrier? Got our family, but got our whole state involved. It really did.

Joe Severino: He played football at West Virginia University, short time, was a quarterback. After he was finished with college, he worked at his family's store in Marion County. My father, when he got out of the service in 46, started a little furniture store beside the grocery store. So we grew up in the retail business. I've always said in politics, it's retail. This is retail politics. And retail politics is simply knowing who your customer is and making sure they're satisfied. And then he gets launched into the state house of delegates. Then the state senate. Then he tries to run for governor. Why did you lose? What did you learn from that? I didn't do a good job. I don't think I did a good enough job explaining who I was and what I thought the state could be and how we were going to change the state. And I lost that election. And then goes to secretary of state. And then he's governor. Leaving the governor's office was one of the toughest decisions I had to make. And we we achieve so much as a state but when I look at what challenges we have ahead of us in Washington, I know it's time to take that fight there so you know and the work that he's always tried to do you know, he's always just been let's get people to the middle and move forward that's his jam, huh? Yes, I mean he's called himself the spear catcher to me that's what he was going to be for the next two years but he's been the spear catcher in Washington for a long time.

Joe Severino: And it's going to come up time and again over the course of the next two years, I imagine, on any number of issues. But we've got three in front of us right now. We've got the $15 minimum wage, the $1.9 trillion stimulus, and then the confirmation of Biden's cabinet picks. Joe Manchin's been holding up this $15 minimum wage situation. How come? He's of mind that $15 will not work in West Virginia. He calls West Virginia economy entirely rural which is pretty much the case. We have a couple of urban centers but you drive five minutes out of town you back in the hollers you know. And so his I think a lot of people just looked at that and said OK 11 is in the middle of 7 and 15 That's obviously why I picked it. But he said if you work 40 hours a week and goes to work 50 weeks out of the year, basically should be above the poverty guideline. $22,000, which is for the federal poverty guideline for a family of three. You know, and that's where the debate comes in. Is $22,000 enough for three Americans to live off today? But, you know, Joe has settled on the 11 and he ain't going to budge.

Joe Severino: How about the $1.9 trillion stimulus? His deep beef with that is all budget reconciliation. He doesn't believe that the minimum wage should be put in there. He kind of got a cover through the Senate parliamentarian. But, you know, he's of mind that the Democrats should not be using their power to put some of this immediate relief through the reconciliation. Because one thing, you know, I did not know about him until hanging out with him is how concerned he is about the national debt. My number one goal, fix the finances, fix the finances. Raising debts don't fix debts. Sooner or later, someone's got to fix the debt. When I was with him, he just pulls out his phone. He said, you know, an aide texts me every day what the national debt was or how much it's grown since the previous morning. He just opened his phone, pulled it out, reads, good morning, Senator. The national debt today is yada, yada, yada, trillion, yada, yada. He's calling for major spending, but only targeting, you know, only, you know, infrastructure projects, major transportation projects. But, you know, immediately for Americans, you know, he thinks it's been adequate for most Americans right now.

Joe Severino: I guess a lot of Democrats are currently making the argument that this is a time to spend and the only risk is spending too little. Sounds like Joe Manchin doesn't buy that argument. Yeah, I mean, President Trump blew a hole in the national debt. Let's not, you know, mince words here. And so Joe doesn't want to be the party that takes it even further. He wants to see spending more targeted. He just thinks we're just throwing money out there at the problem. I'm just making sure if we're going to throw out, you know, going to put a hole in the debt this size, we got to help people. And the third thing I mentioned were these nominations. We learned this week that one cabinet nominee, Neera Tanden, withdrew her name because Senator Manchin didn't like her tweets. He's also been voicing skepticism on Deb Haaland, who would be the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history, though. I think Manchin did later say he'd confirm her. But notably, Manchin was the only Democrat to confirm Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as attorney general under the former president.

Joe Severino: Is he more worried about the backgrounds of Democrats than he is Republicans? Yeah, you can absolutely critique Joe Manchin for his stances on, you know, what people are calling a double standard. On what Neera Tanden had tweeted in her time about both parties based on what Jeff Session and Rick Grinnell and Brett Kavanaugh have all done in their past. Joe Manchin doesn't support anything outright and before he needs to. So I think that's par for the course for him, that he wasn't going to announce what he thought of Deb Haaland's confirmation until the hearings were over. It might bear repeating that I was the most bipartisan freshman in my first term in Congress. That's because I came here to get work done. I was really waiting to see if she's one of these people who will be a bipartisan worker. So, you know, as we get through these last confirmation hearings, we'll see how the last of these secretaries are going to fill in. We're not going to know until he decides.

Joe Severino: The whole country is talking about Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia right now, but how is he being received at home right now? Same as the rest of the country. The attacks are coming from everywhere. The left, the right, the middle. You know, they want to see the country move in a particular direction, too. And they know who's calling the shots there in D.C. So people in West Virginia, they're getting tired of the shtick, too, which, you know, that's what Joe's going to ride until, you know, he's done. I think the thing about Joe is I was surprising to see how cool headed he was in the moment. Even in this intense moment where he feels all the spears are coming at him from every direction, even from his friends. You know, he's still cool-headed. He's still sticking to his message of bipartisanship, and I think that's what angers most people about him. It's like, man, do you not feel this sense of urgency in the country? Do you not feel this moment? But I think he knows the moment we're in and he's just sticking to what has gotten him this far.

Joe Severino: Joe Manchin is the last of his kind. A big deal, National Democrat from West Virginia. How that happened, in a minute. Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company. You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.

Sean Rameswaram: We be right back.

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Sean Rameswaram: We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.

Sean Rameswaram: If you're out there wondering why Joe Manchin's a Democrat to begin with, you're not alone. We asked Greg Moore to answer that question. He's been writing about the state for decades, most recently as executive editor of West Virginia's Mountain State Spotlight. Well, he's a Democrat to begin with because West Virginia, until recently, was a very Democratic state. From 1928 until 2000, the state only voted for a Republican for a president three times. And that was when Eisenhower and Nixon and Reagan were cruising to reelection. Joe Manchin's uncle was a very colorful politician here in the state. He was the youngest House of Delegate member back in 1948. And he was one of the famous civil rights way back before it was even thought about. And he was defeated. But he was a favorite of a lot of people here.

Greg Moore: You know, for a while, Democrats were, you know, the only people running in a lot of elections. When I registered to vote in the 1980s, I registered as a Democrat because that was the only way you could vote in the Democratic primary. And a lot of times that was the only contest or that was the real contest. So if you wanted to, you know, make a difference there, that was how you had to do it. I think a lot of people might find that surprising that West Virginia, which is considered such a sort of Republican stronghold, such a red state right now, used to actually be a Democratic stronghold. What made it so?

Greg Moore: Yeah, and it wasn't – I mean it was only a couple of decades ago really. The big factor was the importance of labor unions. You had the coal industry here. You had the steel industry here. And they exerted a fair amount of influence in the political sphere. And of course unions certainly in West Virginia and largely throughout the country are not as strong as they were. There are other reasons. And I don't mean to say Republicans had no political presence here. That's certainly not true. But yeah, the strength of labor unions really was a big factor in that.

Greg Moore: Tell me more about Manchin's connection to coal. We heard in the first half how he grew up in a mining town, but he worked retail himself. He lost an uncle, I believe, at the Farmington Mine disaster in 1968. 78 miners got blown up in that and lost their lives, and more than 50 are still entombed. And my dear Uncle John was one of the fatalities there. You know, there's a connection there, certainly. But he has come up. There have been several mansions in politics in West Virginia. Joe was a state senator. He ran for governor in 1996. He lost the Democratic primary in something of a surprise to a more liberal candidate, and then he turned around and endorsed the Republican candidate who went on to win. To the best of my knowledge, that's the only election Joe Manchin's ever lost. Then he sort of built himself back up. He became secretary of state, and then he became governor.

Greg Moore: And when Robert Byrd, the long-serving U.S. senator from West Virginia, died in 2010, Manchin didn't appoint himself to the seat, but he, as governor, he certainly cleared the way so that he would be the favorite in the special election to replace Byrd. And for people who don't know, Byrd was a Democrat, yeah? He was an old-time, pre-Civil Rights Act Democrat. As in he was straight up in the KKK. And so we, who, like myself, were born in a Southern environment, grew up with Southern people, knew their feelings, knew about the Civil War and all these things. He actually filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which he later said was the thing he most regretted in his senatorial career. But he stayed a Democrat, and he – toward the end of his career, he was actually talking about the need for West Virginia coal communities to diversify their economy. So they were not so reliant on this one boom-or-bust fossil fuel industry. He loved the Senate. He loved the role that he thought it was supposed to play.

Greg Moore: That Senate is the forum where the people speak and where senators can speak as long as their feet will hold them. And if their feet won't hold them, they can sit down and get unanimous consent to speak at their desk. That is the protection of the people's liberties. And so when, you know, there's been some discussion about the filibuster and whether Joe Manchin would be willing to get rid of the filibuster. And thus far, I think he's said he's not interested in doing that or not particularly interested in doing that. He certainly respected Senator Byrd a great deal. And I think there may be some of that as well, that his, you know, respect for the Senate and its history and its tradition.

Greg Moore: At what point is it exactly that the state seems to shift from heavily Democratic to more of a swing state or straight to a Republican stronghold? I think you have to look at 2000. West Virginia voted for Bill Clinton both times. And then in 2000, it was relatively close. But the state did vote for George W. Bush over Al Gore. And some people around here still think about the fact that if Gore had won West Virginia, then he would have had enough electoral votes to be president and Florida wouldn't have mattered at all. But ever since then, it's not been in doubt. Bush won Handley, and then McCain, and then Romney. And in 2016... ...and look at the board right now. Donald Trump now has 24 electoral votes to three for Hillary Clinton because he just won the state of West Virginia. Solid Republican state voted Republican in the last four elections. Of course Donald Trump made an awful made a direct pitch to the coal miners in that state very turned off to Democrats. That is a win for Donald Trump.

Greg Moore: We're also close. But it has been a, if not exactly a straight line, pretty close for the last 20 years. How does that change the nature of of Manchin's leadership in the state? Just in general terms, if you're a Democrat and everyone else in the state is a Republican, your influence is going to be lessened there. In 2016, Joe Manchin recruited our current governor, Jim Justice, to run as a Democrat, which he did, and he won. And then the governor stood up at a rally with Donald Trump and changed to Republican. Today, I will tell you with lots of prayers and lots of thinking. Today, I'll tell you as West Virginians, I can't help you anymore being a Democrat governor. So, and this last election in 2020, the last statewide officeholder in West Virginia who was a Democrat, the state treasurer who'd been here 20-some years, he got beat. So, you know, obviously, as the basically the last Democrat standing on a on a national or statewide level in West Virginia, you know, he can't help but be on a little bit of an island there. Yeah.

Greg Moore: I mean, does the brand matter in West Virginia as much as it does elsewhere? You think about a place like California where, you know, it really means a lot if you're a Democrat or a Republican. Is it that important in West Virginia or is it more about the issues that a given politician stands for? It has become increasingly difficult for Democrats to win because the national candidates have been able to be painted as anti-coal, you know, rightly or wrongly. And I think that's made it more difficult for Democrats to win in West Virginia. And in this moment where you've got a president who wants to do some of the most ambitious spending in this country's history on energy, especially green energy, and Joe Manchin belongs to that president's party, are West Virginians nervous? I don't think they're nervous. I don't want to speak for the whole state. But I think perhaps it's an opportunity. I think if the Biden administration comes in here and wants to do these massive climate change initiatives without recognizing that in places like West Virginia, for generations, the only good paying jobs around were in the coal industry or other fossil fuel industries. If there's nothing to help those communities and those people, then I think Joe Manchin is going to have a really difficult time supporting those.

Greg Moore: Earlier this week, he and Senator Stabenow from Michigan introduced a multi-billion dollar bill. The plan provides a 30% tax credit to companies making clean energy equipment. Up to $8 billion in tax credits are available. Half of that is set aside for communities where coal mines or coal power plants were shut down. Yeah, I mean, Joe Manchin's getting a lot of national attention right now for being, you know, the clinching vote on any number of issues. But is this really a moment for him to make sure that West Virginians can sort of transition to a modern green economy? Is this a moment for him to make sure that West Virginia isn't forgotten? I think that it is a real opportunity for the state because West Virginia, and these are not new problems, even when the coal industry was going great guns. I mean, West Virginia was a high-poverty state. It was one of the unhealthiest states in the nation. And you top that off with new problems such as we have the worst internet in the country by a fair margin, I would say. And there's a lot of assistance that's needed here. I think what people would like is if Joe Manchin can leverage that with the Biden administration to the point where West Virginia can get help for some of those issues, help that it really desperately needs.

Greg Moore: And I know that there are progressives both in West Virginia and nationally who have said, well, let's get somebody better than Joe Manchin in there. Let's get a progressive in there. Well, I don't know how reasonable that is at this point in the state's political history. Understandably, there's a lot of attention on the national level about, is he going to vote with the Republicans or is he going to vote with the Democrats? But I think the story here really is the opportunity. Everything in this state is named after Robert C. Byrd. And he was kind of derisively known sometimes as the Prince of Pork. He was head of the Senate Appropriations Committee back when earmarks were still a thing. But, you know, that sort of thing brings jobs. And if there's a bunch of federal money that comes from Joe Manchin's position right now and the Biden administration's policies, that's going to bring jobs. And that's a real opportunity for West Virginia and I think a real opportunity for Senator Manchin.

Greg Moore: Greg Moore is the executive editor and co-founder of Mountain State Spotlight. It's a nonprofit news outlet serving West Virginia. You can find it online at mountainstatespotlight.org. Joe Severino, who you heard from earlier in the show, wrote about Joe Manchin for the Charleston Gazette Mail. You can find his piece at wvgazettemail.com. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.