Manchin: The country's highest WAR score.
WAR, in sports, has a special meaning. Wins Above Replacement.
The best thing that can happen to Joe Manchin is for Ilhan Omar to be doing exactly what she is doing.
Omar and Manchin are staging an act. I hope they both realize it.
There is a word in professional wrestling to describe a wrestling performance: kayfabe. It is pronounced KAY-fabe. Definition:
Kayfabe is a shorthand term that involves acknowledging the staged, scripted nature of professional wrestling, as opposed to a competitive sport, despite being presented as authentic. As a concept, kayfabe involves both the fact that matches are scripted and that wrestlers portray characters for their show.
Ilhan Omar and Joe Manchin are certainly serious and 100% earnest about their politics. They own and embody the characters they play. That isn't fake. But they do not need to own in equal sincerity their public dispute. The shouting, insults, the Fox interview, the claim of White House staff insults, all combine to look like professional wrestling. I hope so. It would be smart.
The public spectacle gives each of them room to compromise on a new version of Building Back Better. The dispute gives Omar and the progressives political permission to agree to half a loaf. Omar and the Squad aren't stupid. They know the votes for a big progressive bill aren't there. They also understand that Manchin is a West Virginia Democrat.
Manchin insists he is a conservative, but in fact he is a pro-choice FDR-type liberal, elected in a state that had been Democratic because of "solid South" racism. Modern Democrats forget that FDR openly appealed to the attitudes of working men as he found them, and he tolerated their racism as the price of holding office. When open racism became unacceptable for Democrats, West Virginia became Republican. Voters replaced racism with cultural conservatism and suspicion of shiftless, lazy welfare cheats. That is the new political glue in West Virginia and Manchin survives by going along. Whatever Building Back Better bill gets passed must appear to fulfill that glue mandate, and stand up to inevitable accusations that it doesn't. The public fight makes Manchin credible when he claims total victory, even for a bill that includes universal pre-K and some version of a child tax credit.
Here is what I hope for and imagine. I would like Ilhan Omar to ask her chief of staff to call the counterpart at Manchin's office. They set up a meeting at Manchin's office. No staff present, except two or three staff members from each office outside the closed door, while Omar and Manchin visit. It is a social call, so Manchin serves her something. Omar notes that they each have constituencies that get a bum rap. West Virginians have the unfair reputation for being uneducated "rednecks" who live without plumbing and marry their sisters. Her constituents are unfairly targeted as Muslim terrorists. Woe is us. She might acknowledge that West Virginia's hard, shiny anthracite coal is essential to making steel out of America's most accessible iron in her state's Mesabi Iron Range. They have some common ground.
But maybe that is pointless and unnecessary. Maybe she should just let Manchin complain about being forced to be the center of attention and having the incredible burden of power. So many interviews.
Oh, yes, what a burden, she might commiserate. She needs to stay in character here. No eye rolling. If Manchin needs to pretend he is a victim because he has become the most powerful man in the senate, humor him. Oh, yes, senator. It will go against her grain, but women have been manipulating men this way since the beginning of time and men fall for it. It is for the cause. Paris is worth a mass. Kayfabe within kayfabe.
Then, with the door still closed, staff wondering what is going on, she smiles and thanks Manchin and tells him what a magnificent job he has done to win and hold office. Then she starts shouting--something about him destroying America, his blowing an opportunity to save West Virginians in poverty, that he is an utter disgrace. She can storm out of the office, furious, openly scolding her staff for setting up this pointless meeting. She can be confident that Manchin's staff will leak to the media saying Manchin defied that stubborn woman.
Kayfabe. It is how America will get pre-K.
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