One year of 'President Manchin': For the Democratic agenda, all roads go through West Virginia
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WASHINGTON - They wait for Joe. And while they wait, they wonder.
"His entourage vanished," says a reporter.
"Maybe they snuck out the back," says a photographer.
It's a Tuesday in early December. Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., the Flowbee-haired centrist whose vote in the evenly divided Senate could make or break any given deal, had been spotted ducking into Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's office at exactly 11:06 a.m. That's a conspicuous time and place for a private tête-à-tête - just before the Senate's Tuesday lunches, when the Capitol Hill press would swarm the corridors in search of scooplets about the fate of Democrats' social spending bill.
Sure enough, the press has taken notice. And now, they wait.
Waiting around for Manchin has become something of a pastime in the nation's capital. Hill reporters track his movements on the Senate floor, staking out his office, sometimes for hours, and then orbiting around him like electrons as he walks the halls of Congress. On a recent Monday morning, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, bumped into such a gaggle on the way to her office, which is near Manchin's. "What are you guys doing here now?" she asked them. "It's Monday, you know he's not going to get here till 3 o'clock in the afternoon!"
"Sometimes I wish I wasn't chained to this one spot," says Burgess Everett, Politico's chief Manchin correspondent. "But, at the same time, this is the best place to get the news of the day because it's what everyone is interested in."
The power and spotlight has earned the gentleman from West Virginia a new nickname.
"Mister President," Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, once said, greeting Manchin in a Capitol Hill elevator.
"It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden," Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told the New York Times.
"Maybe we should say President Manchin at this point!" then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace chuckled on the air.
It's been an eventful first year of the Manchin presidency. His Washington home, a large boat on the Potomac, has become a floating West Wing: a place that the White House chief of staff (among others) has visited, and where Manchin has hosted raucous, bipartisan parties.
The journalists doing the waiting are proxies for a Washington establishment eager to see how the Biden administration plans to make its mark, and for the millions of Americans who care about an agenda that could change the trajectory of a teetering democracy and a warming planet. They wait for the senator from West Virginia to decide the fate of Cabinet-level nominees (sorry, Neera Tanden). They wait for him to agree to stimulus funding in the midst of the pandemic, which he did. They wait for him to find enough Republicans to back a voting rights bill as state GOP officials clamp down on voting access, which he hasn't. People have mostly stopped waiting for him to nuke the filibuster.
These days everyone's waiting on the Build Back Better bill, the Democrats' signature piece of legislation, which "President Manchin" keeps vetoing before it gets to President Joe Biden's desk.
He's been in Schumer's office for 43 minutes now, and the Manchin stalkers are growing restless.
"Maybe they were allowed to sit inside," someone offers, referring to Manchin's entourage. "That would be nice."
"Maybe the meeting was going to be going on for so long they decided not to wait around," a reporter groaned.
At 11:55 a.m. Manchin emerges into the collapsing mass of reporters notebooks and flashbulbs.
He tells the crowd that he and Schumer, D-N.Y., talked about "one issue." He doesn't say which one. Then he walks across the hall for another private meeting, this time in the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the waiting game begins anew.
"There have been other politicians who have played this Hamlet role before," Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for Schumer, said in an interview. "But Manchin has taken it to a true art form."
- - -
The whole "President Manchin" bit? Not everybody finds it amusing.
"He's not a president," says Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. "The farthest you'll get me to go is I see this as the 'Manchin majority.' "
"It's tongue-in-cheek," says Romney when reminded of his "Mister President" elevator greeting.
"The fact is, he's just a senator," says Anita Dunn, who until recently was a top adviser to Biden.
Plus, she points out, "He supported the rescue plan, he supported the bipartisan infrastructure plan, he has supported the president and his agenda and has worked hard to find a way to support the final big piece of the economic agenda and has negotiated in good faith around it."
"I don't think it's a coup," says Ben Nelson, former Democratic senator from Nebraska, unprompted, of the Manchin presidency.
Nelson may be especially sensitive to the plight of a Democratic senator standing athwart major policy. He played the role of Hamlet in a 2009 production, when President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act. It took intense negotiations, a pressure campaign from the White House, and a lucrative deal to reimburse his home state for Medicare expansion (dubbed the "Cornhusker Kickback" by Republicans) to get him on board.
The former senator doesn't think Manchin is doing anything wrong by wielding his vote this way. "There's not as much pressure in your mind when you think you're doing the right thing," says Nelson.
There is no shortage of people who think Manchin is doing the wrong thing. For climate activists, the West Virginia senator's infamy has grown alongside his power. He's been elemental in stripping environmental provisions out of the BBB, including a plan to phase out the types of coal plants that have made millions of dollars for his family's business. Protesters have gathered in kayaks outside Manchin's floating home. One time, they surrounded his Maserati as he tried to exit a garage.
"Some days there just aren't words for how enraging it is to have this opportunity to address climate change and have one man standing in the way," says Deirdre Shelly of the Sunrise Movement, a climate activism group. "He's a villain."
Meanwhile, the GOP seems to love the guy. Even the Trumpiest Republicans are keen to praise him.
"For Joe Manchin to be standing up against abusive overspending, I think it's great," says Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, as he scurries through the basement of the Capitol clutching a giant poster showing his solidarity with locked-up Jan. 6 defendants. "I'm not sure Biden, based on some of his comments, is nearly as self-aware as Senator Manchin is."
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recalls chatting with Manchin on the Senate floor and telling him, "You know, Joe, one of the two parties actually likes you."
Another reason it's good to be an ersatz president instead of a real one: You have a veto on legislation that would affect the whole country, but only have to answer to voters in a single state. Manchinologists - the sprawling network of friends, former staffers, close colleagues and journalists that chart his every move - will say that the senator is motivated by some combination of what his thinks is good for West Virginia, an extraordinarily right-wing state; what is good for him in West Virginia; and a desire to make his current job more like his old job as governor, which he left 11 years ago to join the Senate and is known to pine for on occasion.
"He's a governor at heart," says Jonathan Kott, a former Manchin adviser who is now a lobbyist.
"A guy always falls back on their successes," says Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. "And Joe comes from the governor's office, where evidently he's had success being out front."
It's a delicate thing, though, being seen as a senator who is trying to act like an executive.
"I would never say, and I think it would be inappropriate to say, that Joe Manchin sees himself as an alternative to what the White House is trying to do," says Steve Clemons, a political commentator and friend of Manchin.
"But,"Clemons adds, "he's trying to be helpful in a way that an executive would."
- - -
It doesn't always feel helpful. Not when the actual president's approval rating is underwater.
The BBB bill could help with that. It contains provisions that could make a difference in the lives of millions of people: four weeks of paid leave, an extension of the child tax credit and investments in renewable energy, including tax credits for electric vehicles. The longer Manchin holds it up, some Democrats argue, the more he puts his party at risk.
"No one has done more damage to Joe Biden's political standing in the first year of his presidency than Joe Manchin," says Shakir, the Sanders adviser. "Because he's been so loud projecting his differences with Biden, people are left wondering, 'Hey, who runs this show?' "
"He will be seen in history as a spoiler figure and not as a leader," says Douglas Brinkley, CNN's presidential historian, of Manchin. "He could cost the Democrats the midterm election."
In a perfectly divided Senate, any Democrat has the power to play spoiler if they want. The fact that few other Democrats seem interested in doing so has only reinforced the "President Manchin" meme, since the West Virginian is often out on a limb (or would that be a branch?) by himself. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has joined him, at times,holding out when fellow Democrats tried raising taxes on the ultrawealthy and lowering prescription drug prices. But Sinema is not nearly as chatty about it as Manchin; she dodges the press in hallways and often seems eager to skip town when the heat is on. Manchin, though, seems to love the scrum.
"He does get more attention because he will always tell you what he's thinking," says Politico's Everett.
Manchin's office, which declined to make him available for an interview, says he hates this kind of attention. "He doesn't like these 'Joe Manchin is the center of the universe' stories," says Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman.
And yet, those who wait for Joe are often rewarded - with a little performance, if not a big revelation. Enough to keep the story going for another day.
Everett, the Politico Manchinologist, describes a "void" created by President Donald Trump's departure.
"In that void," he said, "Manchin has become sort of the most-prominent character in Washington."
- - -
On Monday news broke that the two presidents, one real and one imagined, would be speaking on the phone. To BBB, or not to BBB? That was the question.
That afternoon, camerapeople arrive on the third floor of the Hart office building, unfolding their little travel stools just down the hall from Manchin's office while reporters mill around.
"He's going to come out and say, 'I've got nothing for you,' " one cameraman says, settling in shortly after 3 p.m. "Right?"
"We've got another hour," another sighs. "At least. Maybe more, maybe more."
Reporters pass the time scrolling Twitter and ruefully admiring photos of the sunset, which is not visible from this drab corridor. Older photographers swap stories. (One of them was right there when Al Gore planted that weirdly intense kiss on Tipper at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.)
"Ten minutes out!" a cameraman announces at 4:35, before testing the levels on his microphone: Onetwothreefourfive.
Evening votes are approaching, meaning Manchin will soon emerge to make his way to the Senate floor. Suddenly, a groan: Several reporters checking their phones at the same time have learned ...
"They delayed the votes," one shouts. "Nooooo!"
"Well," a reporter says, "that was the most excitement we've had in two hours."
It's now been 30 minutes since the 10-minute warning with no sign of Manchin, and there's speculation that he might have given them the slip. Just as everyone is about to pack up, a side door creaks open and out comes the senator, wearing an amused smile as if he doesn't know what all the fuss was about.
"I have nothing to say," he says with an exaggerated shrug.
Manchin and the reporters move down the hallway together in a practiced but graceless shuffle.
"Do you think it's possible that they do it this year?" wonders Manu Raju,who covers the Manchin beat for CNN, referring to the bill.
"Anything's possible," Manchin replies. He steps into an elevator. The doors close, and the ersatz president disappears without ceremony. There is no urgent need to follow him. Everyone knows they'll be back here again tomorrow.
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