Worth your time.
Again, there are a few things you need to know about Manchin to understand him.
1.) He honestly, truly, 100% believes that the key to anything is negotiation. He came up in the good ole boy/girl system and totally thinks that there is nothing that can not be accomplished after you build the right relationships.
2.) He will always have as his primary focus getting money and jobs to WV.
3.) He knows that WV is a small state and that things like the filibuster give us outsized political power, and he is not going to give it up.
He can be infuriating, but this is who he is. At least he is open about it.
Although I wish they would stop calling us (WV) a coal state. We’re not. Coal accounts for less than 2% of state employment. We’re a tourism state, if anything.
SFAW
OK, so you’re “a Cole state.” Happy?
rikyrah
I believe that if we throw a handful of extensive ‘ infrastructure’ projects to WV, we will have no problem with Manchin.
Man ain’t that complicated.
raven
Hangin at the Glassworks Lounge at Oglebay Park! Those we’re the days.
Ohio Mom
I know she is a Republican but what is the story about Shelley Moore? (had to google her name). Talk about having a low profile.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Even now, I don’t think he’s alone in that, at least not on the Dems’ side.
Kind of on topic: I don’t know why the Sirius NPR channel was re-airing an old episode of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me when I drove to the grocery store this weekend, but it was from soon after Robert Byrd’s death (2010) and the quiz was about all the ways Byrd had steered money to WV, including a Coast Guard command center that’s mostly responsible for managing CG operations in New Orleans.
David Anderson
The assumptions between #2 and #3 are in tension — the most priority in a bill that passes goes to the marginal vote. Manchin is an extremely likely marginal vote in a 50/51 vote Senate. He is never going to be close to the marginal vote in a 60 vote Senate.
If he wants the Greater Charleston Manchin/Byrd International SpacePort built, that is a gettable ask at #50
SFAW
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s nothing. Bob Dole once got a submarine base for Kansas.
RM
Unrelated but, WTF is up with Kelly Anne Conway?!?!
ian
Jim Justice and Don Blankenship on line two for you.
raven
@RM: What’s a “fleet”?
Almost Retired
I couldn’t agree more with this take on Manchin. I don’t know much (anything) about West Virginia politics, but my guess is that the state is unlikely to elect any other Democratic Senator in the foreseeable future. So an imperfect Democrat, by our standards, is better than another standard-issue Red State lunatic.
Brachiator
Was he asleep during the Trump administration when McConnell refused to even talk to Democrats when drafting tax law or ramming judges through to confirmation?
I will read the article later today. But did WV still get lots of goodies while Trump was in office?
LurkerNoLonger
A lot of whining about Manchin, but has he ever fucked the dems when they needed him?
RM
@raven: A new thing on Twitter, apparently.
PST
Thank God for Joe Manchin. We won’t see another one like him from WV for ages. I don’t miss old-style segregationist deep south democrats one bit, but I’d love to have a few border state and prairie state democrats back even if they weren’t the greatest.
raven
@RM: Thanks, I thought it was an enema thing!
raven
@LurkerNoLonger: Whiners gonna whine!
RobertB
@raven: The description I read is that it’s a post that gets deleted after a day.
Barbara
A few West Virginia tidbits: Regarding tourism, WV is the site of the most recently designated national park (last one being more than 20 years ago), which is the New River Gorge. I think I read that only 7000 acres have “true” national park restrictions, but the whole park area is over 70,000 acres. NPS Link
I started reading a book called The Third Rainbow Girl, which is a coming of age memoir/true crime story set in Pocahontas County, WV, which is on the Virginia border, in approximately the same area as the Greenbrier resort. Author is Emma Copley Eisenberg. Lots of interesting information about West Virginia along with an engaging author.
Geminid
Speaking of tourism, last month Joe Manchin pushed through legislation making the New River Gorge National River’s 72,186 acres a National Park and Preserve. A great place for floating, hiking, biking, birdwatching, and just enjoying the beautiful river and mountains and valleys. The New River is really something. Way bigger than the James of Virginia or the Chattahoochee of Georgia.
Leto
@raven: that’s probably the best description of that feature I’ve seen. It’s a Twitter enema.
Barbara
@Geminid: Great minds think alike. Last summer, my family went to the New River Trail State Park in Virginia. It’s one of Virginia’s newest state parks, close to the North Carolina border, in a relatively tamer section of the river (which is, overall, not a tame river). There is a bike trail that is already around 70 miles long, with plans for expansion. Apparently, because of a variety of geologically significant events many moons ago, there are some unique species found in parts of the New River.
Also, my husband told me it is called the New River because when Frye and Jefferson first mapped the area, they didn’t find it. So the “New River” is the river that was found after the original groundbreaking topographic mapping of the area first occurred. Peter Jefferson is Thomas Jefferson’s father.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PST: I’m not advocating for a Manchin caucus, but the states we need to hold and flip to keep Mitch McConnell in the minority are pretty purple. Just sayin’
Anonymous At Work
We’d also wish WV would stop calling itself a coal state and wishing for ‘the good ole days’ back, just as much as you.
Immanentize
West Virginia! Eco-tourism Heaven!
Create a “Coal Miner’s Village” like Sturbridge Village or Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts. Pay college students and olds to pretend to be coal miners and Company Town Bosses and Pinkertons. Put up something like the Grand Ol’ Opry for Blue Grass and original Country.
Make “I’ll Never Pick Cotton” the State Tourism Anthem.
RobertB
@Geminid: I grew up in southern WV, and was spoiled for scenery. I scoff at the ‘scenic overlooks’ here in Ohio.
BR
John, any chance folks can convince Manchin to agree to the talking filibuster as a matter of tradition? I think that would still give Dems the ability to filibuster crazy things down the road, but GOP senators are lazy and won’t bother. Ted Cruz will read the phone book for a day to grandstand, then everyone will vote.
Ken
How fortunate that there are tourists who like to visit flattened mountains, valleys of rubble, and impoundment ponds filled with toxic slurry.
FridayNext
WV is a coal state like Baltimore is a blue collar town. It’s a health care and service industry town.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@BR: a whole lot of crazy and preening in the R caucus, so I don’t doubt there would be a line of halfwits (Johnson, Cornyn) and crackpots (Paul, Lee) and boths (Blackburn, Tuberville) lining up to read Dr Seuss, Ayn Rand and David Barton books out loud, but being able to show footage of the remarkably unlikable Ted Cruz or the looney-tunes Blackburn actively impeding the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would be better for Dems than “Senator Roy Blount objected to closure this afternoon…”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I would think that with tourism being so big that it would behove the citizens of WV to avoid getting a reputation as filled with hostile loons.
gene108
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
We would be so much better off, if Congress people focused more on getting federal money directed to their state, than our current situation of nothing getting done.
ColoradoGuy
Why not bring back earmarks, so Senators can quietly roll in goodies for the folks back home? It’s not “waste” or “pork”, it’s taking care of the voters. A post office, maybe with local banking services, a scenic highway, or broadband fiber to remote towns? All in the fine Democratic tradition of making life a little better and less isolated.
Phylllis
@ColoradoGuy: I think they are bringing earmarks back.
Anya
He never tried to build a relationship with Obama.
Having said that, I don’t mind if he looks out for his state and I fully understand that he comes from one of the most conservative states in the union but he still votes with the democrats more than his state would like so there is that…
Anya
@RM: Is it possible her daughter has set her up? What mother would post her daughter’s nudes (unless you’re Kris Jenner and doing it for publicity. Kellyanne Conway has more to lose than her daughter.
Eunicecycle
@Phylllis: I kinda hope so. It gave members something to trade for, to get votes. Yes I guess it’s buying votes but if it works to get some of our priorities passed it will be worth it. And it gets money to some community priorities that wouldn’t ever get funded with the current gridlock.
sherparick
@Ohio Mom: Her father was Arch Moore, a Republican, when that was still a rare thing in West Virginia. Besides have his political career end with an indictment & conviction, this was also a time when a Republican Governor would do things like: “He would go on to advocate for insurance benefits of hospital workers and pay increases for teachers and other school staff. Furthermore, he pressured the West Virginia legislature to increase workers compensation benefits by 75% and helped to settle a national strike of coal miners.[28]”
schrodingers_cat
People do realize that any D senator from a blue or red state is never going to say or do things like say blog favorite EW. If they do they won’t get elected and we will be stuck with someone like Hawley. (Who had become a favorite of the Rose brigade for a brief while because he embraced $2000 individual checks. Its not just people on the right that want a herrenvolk democracy)
I am so old that I remember people complaining incessantly about Claire McCaskill.
Keith P.
@Ken: Come for the slurry, stay for the moonshine!
Fair Economist
Isn’t WV best described as a tourism state that *thinks* it’s a coal state? Coal’s pretty trivial economically but it still seems to have an outsized influence on the politics.
Geminid
@rikyrah: There are ways to keep help Manchin’s state. For one, help get the W. Va. wind power industry growing. There are potentially a lot of jobs there, more if ways and means are found to make turbines, blades and pylons in state. Investments training former coal coal miners and others to build clean energy infrastructure could help.
In a different area, we could make sure there are plenty of Americorp workers insulating, plumbing, and wiring poor people’s houses. And leaving the sunny ones with solar panels on top. Americorps can be expanded, and the Department of Energy has an existing energy conservation program that has been underfunded until now.
There are plenty federal lands in West Virginia besides the new National Park. Last year Congress passed an Outdoors Act providing robust funding for federal lands projects. In fact Sen. Manchin was a key sponsor. Given the shaky state of the national economy, the new Administration would do well to get those billions of dollars out as fast as it can be efficiently spent. It’s a needs to be done nationally, but this will particularly benefit this state’s tourist industry, as well as the people who visit the National Forests.
wvng
@PST: ditto. Thank god for Manchin. We need Dems like him to run in conservative states if we are to have any chance at getting and sustaining majorities in the Senate. We can moan about that and wish things were different, but it is true for the foreseeable future. Seems we are not likely to keep a WV Dem Senator in the future though. WV is just ridiculously RED now.
wvng
@sherparick: I have a proclamation from convicted felon Arch Moore naming me a Distinguished West Virginian for heroic actions saving a stupid person during the flood of 1985. :-)
HalfAssedHomesteader
I keep wondering: if we can’t get rid of the filibuster can we at least weaken it? 60 is not some divine number ordained by Dog. Would senate life be more manageable if it was chopped down to 55 or 53? Would it only make the minority dig in deeper? Are there other ways to weaken it like requiring
an increasinga decreasing number of votes over time to sustain it?wvng
@Geminid: You cannot overestimate the power of the anti-choice lobby and “you won’t take my guns” lobby in WV. Also the “I refuse to admit you have done anything for me because I don’t need your damn help even as you do things that materially help me” butthurt lobby. I live in a WV county that has a state of the art fiber optic telecom system that was brought to our homes for free because of Obama’s Stimulus bill, yet my ostensibly Dem county voted 60% for a convicted felon over Obama in 2012 Dem primary.
BruceFromOhio
Back in the early aughts i was introduced to a friend of a friend of a friend who grew enormous amounts of really good weed up on those mountain tops. Legalization may have since put a dent in that trade, but just our little team was once the source of a nice influx of cash to the growers for a while there. My contact ended after an incident where multiple vehicles with out-of-state plates were vandalized, whether by a competitor or locals who did not want outsiders around. There are parts of WVA that may as well be a different country, and I would avoid unless part of a large, well-armed group.
Just Some Fuckhead
So when Manchin wouldn’t endorse Obama in 2012, was that because of 1, 2 or 3?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@BruceFromOhio: weed as a cash crop, grown in the lush hollers of Kentucky, was a big part of the show Justified, which was an entertaining spin on old school lawmen and outlaws TeeVee.
LongHairedWeirdo
With that much information about him, I wonder: has anyone that we know of ever attempted to start calling with a non-legislative purpose, to try to change an attitude? E.g., “I just wanted to remind Senator Manchin that the Republicans still refuse to acknowledge that President Trump was corrupt, and while I value his willingness to reach across the aisle, he needs to realize that there are many areas in which Republicans simply will not engage in good faith… like tax policy, impeachment, insurrection, global warming, the coronavirus…”.
(If there were 8 areas of bad faith, and each message included 5, you could have a lot of different messages about bad faith areas.)
It might get a message across that he has constituents who are perfectly willing, even eager, for him to put some space between himself and Republicans on some of those areas.
BruceFromOhio
@RM: Sounds like a story on IG.
SC54HI
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Re: Byrd & the USCG command center. Going to guess that was a matter of seniority + earmarks which usually resulted in home state benefits, or pork, depending on how one sees it.
WV Blondie
@Fair Economist: That’s a fair description. At the same time, the coal lobby is very well entrenched. Also, the “local” utilities – AEP and the ever-crooked FirstEnergy – still use coal-fired generation plants, so it’s those lobbyists, too. (Which also expands the job base they claim to be trying to protect.) And they make common cause with Frontier, our monopoly telecom/Internet provider, and hands-down the worst in the country. But it employs a helluva lot of people, too.
On a higher-level note, I want to thank John Cole – as a long-time WVian, one of the things I most appreciate about BJ is the general lack of vitriol spewed in West Virginia’s direction (Ken at #28 being a notable exception today).
West Virginia is a very poor state. It tends to make up for it by being a very proud one. (A dynamic I’m sure many people recognize.)
The Democrats who ran it for so many years made lots of bad decisions, which created the opening for the Republicans to take over. That is unlikely to change until they, too, boost the misery index so high that people understand they’re getting still getting screwed – even harder and in new ways.
BruceFromOhio
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I do recall, very much enjoyed Olyphant’s character.
Just Some Fuckhead
Spoken like someone who has never seen the majestic purple Kanawha River or stood on a mountaintop after a brief scramble.
WV Blondie
@Just Some Fuckhead: It was because he was running for the Senate that year. From Wikipedia:
Manchin won the 2010 special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by incumbent Democrat Robert Byrd’s death with 54% of the vote. He was elected to a full term in 2012 with 61% of the vote, and reelected in 2018 with just under 50% of the vote.
Wikipedia points out that he was elected governor in 2004, reelected in 2008, even though WV voted Republican in the presidential races those years.
So I’d say it was #3 – along with a healthy dose of self-interest.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
My only experience with WV is as a tourist. We used to go to Harpers Ferry a lot as a day trip or weekend getaway when we lived in the DC area. Granted, that’s only about two inches over the WV line, but it is in WV. And we also used to go occasionally to the famous Bavarian Inn in Sheperdstown, which is a few more inches over the WV line.
I’m happy to see that the Bavarian Inn seems to be surviving lockdown. Possibly because there might not be a comparable restaurant within 50 miles.
Barbara
@Fair Economist: Through a variety of circumstances including mostly strong union negotiation, coal might only employ 2% of workers (which is still 1/50 people, which is hardly insubstantial), but those workers are paid better than almost anyone else who isn’t a civil servant working for the federal government.They buy more, they live better. Ergo, they have a strong pull on local imagination and a disproportionately positive effect on other local merchants. Maybe that isn’t as true now, but that’s how it used to be.
Geminid
@wvng: I hope I don’t underestimate the power of politicized ignorance. A year ago my local county supervisors declared the county to be a Second Amendment Santuary. But I imagine it’s much worse in West Virginia. I saw that the state voted 68.6% trump, 29.7% Biden. Manchin got elected Governor as a Democrat, though, and people liked him enough to put him in the Senate. I’m hoping Governor Beshear of Kentucky will take that path.
Barbara
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: If you get tired of German food in Shepherdstown, you could try Maria’s, the informal Mexican restaurant right next to the ice cream shop on the main drag.
kindness
West Virginia isn’t going to give the rest of us any better than Manchin. It’s either a Democrat like him or a Republican with no morals at all. If the Republican party hadn’t changed so much in the last 20 years, Joe’s notions would be reasonable. The thing is if you see what Mitch and Republicans have shoveled down our throats in those 20 years, it’s hard to keep Joe’s faith. Still, he’s way better than Lieberman ever was as a point of reference goes.
Almost Retired
West Virginia is spectacularly beautiful, even if there are some flattened mountains and slurry piles here and there, as a commentator above noted. So it does seem like tourism is the present and the future. Also, apropos to nothing, some years back the WV-born managing partner of a big San Francisco law firm (Orrick Herrington) transferred the firm’s back office operations to Wheeling, and encouraged other law firms and corporations to do so. The private sector counterpart to Senator Byrd’s efforts. Not sure how that worked out, but the ex-WV’ers I’ve met here in California are passionate about their state. My sister lives in DC, and had planned a family reunion in 2020 at The Greenbrier in WV. Coronavirus intervened, somewhat to my relief, because the destination was a bit rich for my cheap-ass blood.
L85NJGT
“American carnage” is at the root of Trump’s big lie (and Bernie’s as well). Those jobs are gone and ain’t coming back.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Those hostile loons don’t think they are. They think their grievances are real, and in some cases they actually are. But often it’s just people looking to have the same way of life that 3 or 4 generations have had. Or at least they think they have had and also relying on natural resources for stability of income and work. Except those natural resources are filthy and deadly to the workers and the users and can be replaced with far better alternatives now. Except also said workers don’t have a fall back position so they are fucked, while the owners of the failed natural resource have made far more money and the closest they’ve ever come to suffering from the mining or use of said natural resource is possibly choking on the money they cheated the workers out of and of not having a fall back position to keep making money off of the heath and lives of said workers.
Coal is gone, especially in WV, but because it was by far the natural wealth of WV, and the transition has been made harder by the owners of the no longer existing natural resource, the people themselves have to make the transition. I’ve known a number of people in WV and have been there a number of times, it’s a beautiful place but difficult to build a replacement industry for the mining of coal because of the geography and location.
wvng
@Geminid: I received a claim to international fame when The Economist magazine called me in 2012 to ask wtf happened in my county to have 60% of registered Dems voting for a convicted felon rather than Obama in the primary. I was chair of our county Dem committee at the time. I said a bunch of things, but the only ones that were for attribution were those safe for a “come here” … so, not race. The article went viral because of the comments of one of our Republican county commissioners, who said a bunch of wingnut things about Obama (he’s a Muslim, didn’t really kill Osama Bin Laden, etc) not realizing he was talking crazy to a highly respected magazine with global circulation. He didn’t realize what he was saying was nuts because everyone he talks to talks like that.
Barbara
@Almost Retired: I know of other law firms that have tried that. How well it works out depends on what you mean by back office. Initially, you start with the people who were already working for you and willing to relocate. The challenge is recruiting new people as those people retire, drift back to where they came from or are simply unwilling to relocate. Even the back office functions in a law firm require people with college degrees and experience. I had a client who tried something similar in an area of Pennsylvania and they had to move a bunch of things back because they just couldn’t find enough workers for higher level roles.
L85NJGT
@Barbara:
I suspect Moore’s Law has destroyed any cost savings from hosting the back office in Bumblefuck.
cintibud
I wish I could find the original story but I remember reading about a company that a couple of world class whitewater kayakers started called Immersion research (IR). IR is a well respected company that sells high quality whitewater gear and clothing. They originally wanted to make board shorts since they loved them for paddling and couldn’t find good quality shorts. They started their company in Confluence, PA near the Youghiogheny river, a whitewater destination. Confluence is about an hour NE of Morgantown WV and is a former mill town that has fallen on hard times. The owners were excited about revitalizing the town but soon ran into problems that can be very instructive.
It was a fascinating story about the start up of a small business – The owners, John and Kara Weld, had roots in the area and didn’t have a lot of cash. They had to purchase very expensive sewing machines and they had to learn to repair and service on there own. Their designs were a hit with the whitewater world and orders started coming in droves.
However, in that part of PA they had big labor problems. All the experienced mill workers from the past had died or were too old so they had to train everyone. Even though unemployment was high they had a hard time getting workers who would show up, let alone show up on time. There was a lot of problems with addiction and they had problems with workers ripping them off to feed their habits. They were at their wits end when someone showed them how much money they could save by moving the manufacturing to China.
It’s a sad the way the story ended. This wasn’t a big corporation, this was a couple in hock to their eyebrows trying to survive. They couldn’t save Confluence on their own. I wish I could find the original story – it’s actually pretty recent – I did find the FB announcement of their purchase of the old mill factory, dated 2013
IR is a successful and respected brand to this day. I don’t know where things stand now
Almost Retired
@Barbara: Interesting. You inspired me to dig more into how that worked out for Orrick. I think that back office in this context met a lot of word processing and document production stuff, which as you note is not unskilled labor. And the labor pool in Wheeling is probably not representative of the state as a whole, given it’s proximity to Pittsburgh and (to a lesser extent) Columbus.
Update: It worked out: https://www.orrick.com/Locations/Wheeling
Barbara
@cintibud: I’ve been to Confluence. It’s about 20 minutes from Ohiopyle, which is one of the most popular whitewater rafting and kayaking destinations on the East Coast. It’s around 90 minutes south of Pittsburgh, not far from Falling Water and Kentuck Mountain — Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
Politico published an article about Johnstown, PA, not far away, that highlighted what has happened to the labor force in this part of the world in the last generation. A local manufacturer of nails and related parts said that he could probably double his output if only he could find workers who could pass a drug test. People in Johnstown were offended, but yeah, we perhaps discount the impact of social problems on the ability of locations like Confluence to expand their economic opportunities. Once things go downhill it can be really hard to turn them around.
bcw
I have to note that despite what Manchin said in public it didn’t give McConnell the confidence to continue his refusal to allow the operation agreement to happen. My take is that Schumer was able to tell McConnell that if he kept going Manchin was going to oh-so-reluctantly have to make an exception to his support of the fillibuster for this one case to get the committees going. The result was Manchin kept his filibuster cred while the Democrats got what they needed. McConnell didn’t want to cause the first instance of Democrats voting down the filibuster even if nominally a one-off.
sdhays
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Unfortunately, this is what I thought immediately when I saw this post. My friend drove out to meet me in Virginia a few years ago. He’s a big guy but not white and he stopped to get gas in West Virginia and determined that he was not going to stop in West Virginia again because how uncomfortable he felt.
Tenar Arha
Probably dead thread but this makes better sense here.
There’s so little I can do from here to help, it makes me wish for impossibilities. I mean I live in Massachusetts, & I have Senators who are very responsive, & even my conservative old school Dem Rep understands constituent pressure & doing the right thing. They’ve just been mostly stuck in the trap of McConnell’s making.
I do sometimes wonder with “old school” Senators who want to serve their constituents, & who amass power for that reason, like Sinema & Manchin, if it’s just better to remind them they’ll have significantly less power in the Senate if there isn’t a Democratic majority. And then ask all casual like if they’ve noticed that the GOP legislatures in multiple states are already trying to make voting even harder already this week? Maybe ask how long do they think they’ll stay in a majority or get elected themselves without the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect their voters’ rights so they can keep doing good for the people of AZ/WV? Bc we know it won’t pass without eliminating the filibuster, & when were they running again?
I’m not as familiar w voter suppression in WV, but if they do anything like what the AZ legislature is already planning….Well it makes me wonder if Manchin wants to spend, at minimum, his last 2 years in the Senate powerless under McConnell? And then I wonder what can Schumer offer him?
J R in WV
@Immanentize:
All this exists right now. Beckley, very near the New River, has a coal mine you can go into, and a coal town with buildings relocated from the original coal camps. There’s an outdoor musical about the founding of the state in the Civil War, alternates with one about the Hatfields and McCoys feud,
The New River has mines you can hike around. There is a Hatfields and McCoys Trail for 4-wheelers, with a ton of people coming in for a week of back country mud running. I pretty much grew up in the New River gorge, back before it was a park.
J R in WV
@Ken:
While I can’t deny that there are plenty of places like that here… the vast majority of the state remains untouched. If you WANT to see those things, no one will stop you from trespassing on those industrial sites.
But the vast majority of the state is as beautiful as it was in 1600, while the Spanish were the only Europeans wandering around North American. There’s nowhere to really grow cotton. Grow up, there are places like that in every state. Look at the hog waste lagoons in NC, or the copper mines in AZ…
J R in WV
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Purple Kanawha River? What did they put in it to make it purple??? It is pretty at sunset! Not too toxic any more, either.
Plus, most mountain tops in the central and eastern parts of the state require way more than a brief scramble!