Manchin May Be Saving Dems from Destroying Themselves

CLAY: Build Back Better. Remember that, Buck? It was supposed to happen.

BUCK: There has not been building, it has not been back, and it is clearly not better.

CLAY: 0-for-3 for Build Back Better, and Bernie Sanders, he ain’t happy about it. Let’s play cut 19. We gotta update you. It’s not happening before Christmas. BBB, it may not be happening at all.

SANDERS: You’ve got 48 people in the Democratic caucus who are prepared — and a president of the United States prepared — to think big. And you have two Democrats who in my view are kind of acting like Republicans. You got two people saying, “Hey, if you don’t do it my way, I don’t care what the president wants. I don’t care what 48 of my colleagues want. It’s my way or the highway,” and that I regard as arrogance. You can disagree. Look, I have disagreements, as you well know. All right? You fight for your ideas. But you don’t say, “My way or the highway.”

BUCK: (impression) “My way or duh highway.” Can we just be clear? He’s focusing on the two that are Democrats, and he’s saying, “You know, 48 of your colleagues want…” But there’s also a whole bunch of Republicans that don’t want this to go forward. He makes it sound like one senator was Manchin — or two senators if you add in Kyrsten Sinema — are standing in the way of what everyone wants.

No, half the Senate doesn’t want this. That’s the whole point, Bernie. That’s why we have the system we do. If it were such a great idea, it wouldn’t be such a hard sell even to those two Democrats. Inflation is the number one, by far, economic concern people have in the country right now in the most recent polling. And when you look at this, you say they’re trying to do the one thing — the Democrats want to ram through the one thing — that is most assuredly going to make inflation worse.

CLAY: No doubt. And I think we need to give credit to Joe Manchin from West Virginia and to Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona. First of all, Joe Manchin, he’s where the country is. Joe Manchin is concerned about inflation. The country is overwhelmingly concerned about inflation. Joe Manchin is concerned. By the way, so are the 50 Republicans, but I’m talking about Joe Manchin from the Democrat perspective from stopping this from happening.

Joe Manchin is also concerned that by spending $5 trillion additional dollars and blowing up the debt even more than it already is, that we are going to create more inflationary pressures and inflationary spiral. By the way, so is the country — and it’s worth mentioning that Joe Manchin is in a state that Donald Trump won by 39 points in the 2020 election.

So if Joe Manchin is supposed to be representing the people of West Virginia, and if he wants to run for reelection in 2024, he better not roll through a $5 trillion massive governmental expansion when you truly have a majority that is almost nonexistent in the House and the Senate. I think this is a rational move by Joe Manchin. I think it actually helps the Democrats in all the swing districts and all the purple states. It doesn’t help Bernie Sanders.

He’s gonna win in Vermont no matter what. But for the rational people out there who are sitting around looking at the rise of costs for their gas and the rise in cost of their grocery bills and recognize that even if they’re making more money at their jobs, inflation makes them have less to take home. Joe Manchin is toeing the line and actually protecting them from Democratic economic insanity.

BUCK: He may save them in fact.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They’re all whining. They’re all complaining. But what stops… Look, Democrats are on track to lose the House big, to lose the Senate by, who knows, three, four seats, five seats, who knows? That’s all reality. Are they on track for annihilation in the House, though? Are they on track for the biggest defeat we’ve seen perhaps in decades, many decades? That is going to be tied in directly to the question of inflation and the perception that the American people have about the economy right now.

And Manchin is standing athwart socialist lunacy — while they’re yelling at him — perhaps saving them from their own ideas, their own policies. You know, if AOC actually got her way, folks, I assure you Democrats would be miserable too (laughing) economically. That’s what they don’t understand, most of them, not all of them. The rich wouldn’t care.

CLAY: Look, the lesson of 2021 should be to Democrats. If Virginia, which Joe Biden won by 10 points, can swing 10 points to Glenn Younkin — and if New Jersey, which I think was like a 16-point state, if I’m not mistaken, in terms of Biden beating Trump — if that can nearly swing to the Republican column as well — we’re not just talking, Buck, about purple states that are in play.

We’re talking about states that Democrats aren’t even considering as threats and congressional seats that Democrats aren’t even considering as threats. This is a 1994-style implosion that the Democrats are squarely staring down. Joe Biden’s best protector in terms of the midterms, whether they want to admit torrent, might end up being Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who are gonna protect the Democrats from destroying themselves.

BUCK: We’ve been talking about what the plan will be, what they’re gonna try to do given that there’s not a record to push. They can’t even come up with coherent talking points to tell people why they should vote Democrat again the next time around based on the achievements of the Biden regime, right? So what are the areas of agitation and mobilization they’re gonna go for?

Well, you brought up abortion, the Supreme Court case. Clearly that’s gonna factor in next year. We also see they want to talk about changing some of the rules about voting and how all that’s gonna go. They’ll justify that, of course, by saying that there is voter suppression and all kinds of racist schemes underway by Republicans to prevent people from voting. Here’s Mitch McConnell talking about it.

MCCONNELL: I noticed the emphasis on the other side seems to have changed from a reckless tax-and-spending spree to the voting issue again. So let me repeat for the umpteenth time: There’s not a single state in America that has passed a law that is making it more difficult to vote based upon race. The Voting Rights Act is still fully intact. It’s been against the law since the sixties — and remains against the law today — to discriminate against people based upon race. There are, however, things that states do engage in to ensure ballot security, things like voter ID at the polls that most Americans think is a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

BUCK: Showing your papers to get a cheeseburger in New York totally, fine. Showing voter ID to ensure the integrity of our elections, racist. They’re so dishonest, Clay. The Democrats are such liars on the issue of voter expression that they will claim voter suppression schemes in states where the African-American vote turnout increased after these laws.

Which I believe either… I think it was South Carolina. Might have been North Carolina, where they made all this complaint, “Oh, it’s so racist what they’re doing in voting,” and then they set an all-time record in the next election for African-American turnout. So, you know, if they’re trying voter suppression, they’re pretty darn bad at and you can just expect more and more of those lies out there.