Well you asked about a “full on” Blue Dog. How is Manchin not that?
He still has one or two lefty positions on some things. But I’d put him in the center/center left of what we used to call BD, but not full on.
So answer my question. Why hasn’t he been voted out?
I’m not a constituent of his, that’s why.
EDIT: did you change the question?
If you’re asking why the people who are able to vote him out, haven’t yet, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.
I answered your question. I’m not familiar with you on these boards. Just curious what you personally feel about the election? Do you think Trump won? What do you think about January 6th?
Then do your homework. I’ve been here a looong time and was quite vocal about my feelings on Trump.
But that’s irrelevant.
What’s relevant is my post about McCain and this thread about Manchin. When McCain was being an obstructionist to my party the lefties were tickled pink.
Now they know how it feels to have someone on their side not play ball. A little rubbing it in is in order.
Yes… I see.what you’re doing.
I’m not interested enough to look up your history here. I did see that you’ve been here for a while. I was going to ask, if you weren’t a Trump loyalist, whether or not you like any part of this bill Biden’s trying to pass… So I was going to stay on topic. I was also going to ask what McCain stood in the way of that pissed you off.
I just don’t care anymore.
The way for the Democratic Party to stop “neglecting the state” would be for it to move sharply to the right, especially on cultural issues. This would probably be unacceptable to the vast majority of the party’s current voters. There isn’t some huge untapped well of Democrats who just haven’t learned that they’re Democrats yet and are only voting for Republicans because they haven’t had the right knock on the door.
Democrats love to tell ourselves that all we need to do to win is organize and show how good we are and make sure people have access to facts, but it’s not really true. Lots of voters really do hate us because they’ve correctly figured out what we want society to look like.
No such beast. The only guy replacing Manchin is going to be a Republican, and there aren’t many three-star Republicans left, let alone five.
Yes, Joe Manchin, as annoying as he is, probably has the highest value over replacement in the entire Democratic Senate caucus. The only other ones who compare are Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, who I like much more than Joe Manchin but who are in states that aren’t anywhere near as dire. (The worst by this metric is probably Bob Menendez, who is in a ~D+11 state but is terrible on all kinds of issues and doesn’t get nearly enough attention for it. If only that damn jury hadn’t hung.)
Manchin is a boil on the buttocks of the party, but unfortunately his votes are needed. If we can get something, anything at all, positive that he can stomach that certainly is better than what we would get from a McConnell-led Senate.
I don’t get the Republican hate for McCain. He was the freaking nominee and he became persona non grata for not drinking the Trumpian koolaid and for failing to help kill the ACA. I’ll give him credit for both. He knew Republicans had no plan to replace the ACA. After 8 years of whining about it and lying about it (death panels, anyone?) they didn’t spend five minutes coming up with an alternative. So they were about to just pitch it with no clue as to what to do next. McCain put the brakes on before the car went over the cliff.
Given the general low IQ and stupidity expressed in your posts in this thread, I’m not sure why I’m bothering–but McCain spent like 35 years in the Congress and was basically never obstructionist. Nice try. I have no idea “what you were told” years ago, but it could be you were just saying stupid things (like you’re doing in this thread) and people reacted based on that stupidity and low quality of the content you were posting.
Withholding health care from poor people, is my guess.
(My bolding.) Yes, this. GET THE BILLS PASSED and live (i.e. get re-elected in 2022) to legislate another day.
Get the bills passed, Democrats. You need them to run on. Don’t let “forcing Joe Manchin to vote for what we want” become your mission–that’s a loser.
It looks to me like Manchin is feeling the pressure. He’s coming out yelling at progressives for “playing political games.” Thing is, that’s just what it means to be a politician. It’s called leverage and political capital. That he’s trying to appeal to the public suggests that his leverage isn’t working as well as he thought it should.
“Political games” that aren’t effective wouldn’t bother him. I suspect progressives are willing to play a more risky hand. They see not doing anything about climate as just dooming us all anyways. And there are signs that Manchin won’t be able to hold onto his seat anyways (assuming he even runs).
Anyone who thinks McCain was being “obstructionist” over the ACA vote is kind of silly, or stupid–which pkbites sounds like he’s both. Trump and the GOP had campaigned on “repeal and replace” for years. They tried for like a month to come up with a replacement plan, gave up when the caucus couldn’t agree on one. Then tried to rush a repeal plan through the Senate basically contravening almost every norm and process in Senate rules to get it done. Also both Murkowski and Collins also voted against it, they just assumed they could burn those votes and it wouldn’t matter, they were wrong.
McCain was in favor of repealing Obamacare, and had said as much for a decade+, he said right after that he’d support going through the normal legislative process and actually finding a replacement (which by the way, is what the party had campaigned on–the party never campaigned on "repeal with no replacement.) It’s very telling that the GOP never tried to revive the issue even though they had plenty of time to do so, the simple reality is they couldn’t agree on how to replace Obamacare.
Also the bill they were taking to the Senate floor was (by admission of the GOP senators themselves) not a plan they actually wanted, just something that would let them figure out a plan when they were conferencing their bill with the house bill. They actually tried to make it something that would be awful enough to prevent the house from just approving it with no changes and sending it to Trump.
Wow. You certainly put me in my place.
I guess McCain was called a maverick because he always toed the party line.
Well point of order–McCain did follow the party line almost all the time. He actually consistently rated as one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, he was not the equivalent of say a Lincoln Chafee (a contemporary Republican of his) who was regularly one of the most liberal Republican Senators–in fact after his one term of office as a Republican Senator in Connecticut, he switched parties to the Democrats, where his views were perfectly fine (in fact Chafee is/was more liberal than Joe Manchin is.)
McCain was a foreign policy hawk, a fiscal conservative, a small government conservative, a strong pro-life conservative, a pro-gun conservative. The idea he was obstructionist simply doesn’t get reflected in history.
McCain was called a “maverick” in part (and I liked McCain, but he was a politician, not a Saint) he carefully managed his image so that the few areas where he had significant disagreement with his own party got accentuated heavily in the news media…which helped feed a narrative that he was a “Maverick.” The actual one area where he was a significant maverick was on campaign finance reform, and even then some portions of his own party were on board with him–McCain-Feingold got passed because there were elements of both parties that were in favor of it (it was quickly gutted by Citizens United.) The only other area where McCain was even somewhat of an outlier from his caucus was he was very forceful in denouncing Bush era “enhanced interrogation techniques”, but I can’t really recall a time where these few areas of policy difference from his party resulted in McCain being “obstructionist.” In fact, McCain was a part of a Senate group that for several years in the late 2000s / early 2010s was instrumental in dealmaking and getting legislation through a very divided congress…that’s almost the opposite of the definition of “obstructionist.” Rand Paul is an obstructionist, frequently obstructed legislation from both parties and often for no rational discernible reason. McCain wasn’t.
McCain was different from many of his Republican colleagues in his ability to work well with members of the other party at times, but I don’t call that being a “maverick” as much as being a good politician.
I know times have changed, but that didn’t used to be remarkable.
McCain wasn’t a maverick in any real sense.
The only reason we remember him as a “maverick” is that Republican strategists in 2008 realized they couldn’t run on Bush’s record, especially regarding Iraq. If they wanted a Republican to win, they needed one who seemed “different”. McCain was the best fit, so they surgically rebranded him to seem way more independent than he actually was. This also included running with Sarah Palin, who was such a nutbag weirdo that she was brandable as “maverick”.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the Republican party of ass-kissers, bootlickers, and homework-copiers, John McCain qualified as “maverick”.