Joe Manchin: The Outlier
The West Virginia Senator went to D.C. to get stuff done. Oh
well
Time Magazine
19 June 2014
By Jon Meacham
Things are best, he figures, the farther away he can get. As the
junior Senator from West Virginia, Democrat Joe Manchin
III–charming, plainspoken, moderate–believes his most productive
hours as a lawmaker are spent not on the Senate floor or in the
cloakroom or committee rooms but on the waters of the Potomac
River aboard his houseboat, which, in an act of parochial pride,
he plans to christen Almost Heaven.
Anchored 8 miles south of the Capitol, the boat is Manchin’s home
when he spends the night in Washington three nights or so a week
during session. (“I wasn’t crazy on buying any real estate in
Washington, not at all,” Manchin says.) The houseboat and its
predecessor, the Black Tie, serve as a kind of floating incubator
of that tenderest of Washington flowers in the first decades of
the 21st century: bipartisanship. “Nobody knows anybody up here,”
Manchin, 66, says of the Senate. “It’s amazing. There just aren’t
enough real relationships.”
That’s where the boat comes in. With pizza and beer (and the
occasional bottle of merlot, a shared favorite with Republican
Saxby Chambliss of Georgia), Manchin routinely invites Senators
from both parties out for evening cruises. “Like a Tom Harkin and
a Ted Cruz–when would you ever get them together in a room, O.K.?”
Manchin said to TIME. “And you’d be surprised how much people have
in common.” Charles Schumer of New York is a particularly
enthusiastic guest. “Schumer loves it so much, the whole ambience
of it,” says Manchin. “Schumer thinks it’s his boat.”
And so Manchin is trying, but by his own account, the task of
restoring some measure of comity to the halls of Washington is
likely to take more merlot than his boat can safely carry.
Moderates like Manchin are an endangered species on Capitol Hill.
A conservative Democrat with a bias toward action rather than
rhetoric, he represents an older style of politics, and the story
of his frustrations with life in the Senate–a story he tells with
characteristic candor–puts a face on the largely abstract national
angst about Washington. Put another way, if Joe Manchin can’t make
headway on the Hill, could anyone?
For now, the answer is probably no. The moment is hardly congenial
for centrist dealmaking, which is the skill set that former
governors like Manchin often bring to Washington. With the Tea
Party defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor and the troubled
re-election bid of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, who also
faces a challenger from the right, congressional politics is now
more often about playing to the base than building alliances
between parties. “I know dysfunctional families that function
better than the Senate does,” says Manchin. “It’s just crazy.”
Given that the dysfunction seems impervious to therapy, a Senator
like Manchin has to make a decision: stay and fight, or go? And if
he goes–in his case, most likely to return to West Virginia to
seek to reclaim the governorship in 2016–then what’s left once the
Almost Heaven has sailed away?
Manchin’s journey to the senate began in the small coal-mining
town of Farmington, W.Va. He was raised in his grandfather’s
grocery store, watching his grandmother take care of the needy in
the neighborhood and absorbing the family’s homespun wisdom. “Son,
if you can say no with a tear in your eye, you’ll be O.K.,”
Manchin’s father, a former mayor of Farmington, would say, urging
his son to empathy–or at least the appearance of it, which amounts
to much the same thing in politics. It was a working-class world,
but the Manchin family was important enough in the state that
young Joe remembers Teddy Kennedy eating his grandmother’s
spaghetti during the pivotal 1960 West Virginia presidential
primary.
Manchin has always had a knack for knowing the right moves.
Growing up in the 1950s, his older sister forced him to learn to
dance so that she could practice with him–which meant that by the
time Joe was old enough for the sock hops, he had something going
for him that a lot of other guys didn’t: how to move around the
floor. That was how he met and wooed his wife Gayle at a
fraternity party at West Virginia University.
A childhood spent in his grandparents’ store tending to
customers–listening to them, figuring out what they needed and how
to get paid for it–prepared him for the folkways of state
politics. After a career in the family businesses, Manchin served
in both chambers of the West Virginia legislature, then became
secretary of state before winning the governorship in 2004. In
Charleston, he was a strong fiscal steward and was a predictably
strong defender of the coal industry. In 2010, when he sought the
Senate seat vacated by the death of Robert Byrd, he ran a campaign
ad in which he took a rifle to a copy of cap-and-trade
legislation–anathema to West Virginia’s coal producers.
Hardly subtle, but it was Manchin who, in the wake of the massacre
of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., in late 2012, joined
Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to propose and push legislation
to strengthen and expand background checks on gun sales in the
U.S. (Pictures of the slain children now hang in the front hallway
of Manchin’s D.C. office.) The bill failed, but the effort
positioned Manchin as a man willing to take political risks back
home for the greater good–and prompted the Washington Post to
publish a front-page piece that described Manchin’s Potomac
hospitality.
There have been some brighter moments. Last summer, after
congressional leaders failed to pass a student-loan fix in part
because it lacked the moderates’ support, Manchin and Angus King
of Maine met and concocted a new proposal. Bringing along six
influential, bipartisan members, Manchin and King beat the
dispiriting odds and passed the new bill 81 to 18 in the Senate.
It passed overwhelmingly in the House and became law. In the days
after the bill’s passage, Manchin’s staff invited King’s staff to
come to their office to celebrate and drink moonshine. The two
staffs continue to exchange West Virginia pepperoni rolls and Sea
Dog beers.
Permalink: http://www.manchin.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/6/joe-manchin-the-outlier-time-magizene