Manchin’s First Appearance After Announcing Retirement? A Timely Discussion on Political Civility

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV at the inaugural Isakson Symposium on Political Civility at the University of GeorgiaPhoto byScreenshot from Symposium Program

ATHENS, GA — Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is already making good on his promise to travel the country and speak about a movement to unite moderate Americans.

The day after he made a public announcement that he would not run for re-election, Manchin made a pre-planned public appearance to discuss extreme partisanship at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, inaugurating the school’s Johnny Isakson Symposium on Political Civility.

Joining former Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO), Manchin remembered the mentor statesman who passed in late 2021 and discussed how civil debate, mutual respect, and common-interest problem-solving can advance the public good.

“I don’t know where to start,” Manchin said. “I was just mesmerized, and so taken by surprise at how polarized the Senate was.”

The Senator, who has a reputation for being independent, said he didn’t get into politics because of party affiliation, but “because I wanted to change things and do things.”

“In our system, we have a duopoly,” he said, “but if a ‘D' or an ‘R’ changes the person, then you’ve got the wrong person in the job for the wrong reason.”

And he blamed party leadership for adding to the partisan predicament.

“If Donald Duck was running against Roy Blunt, from Missouri, as a Democrat, then [they’d say] we’ve got to [support] Donald Duck because he’s a Democrat,” Manchin quipped.

He and Blunt suggested that the best way to curb some of the political polarization was to find common ground.

Manchin said that when he got to the Senate, he said to himself that he wouldn’t sign onto bills that weren’t bipartisan, simply because he knew these bills weren’t going to advance.

“You can’t do it if you don’t have people on both sides that look for [points of agreement],” Manchin said.

“Look at 2020, our 117th Congress. It was 50-50. In 233 years the Senate has never been equally divided for that long of a period,” he said. “[That 117th Congress] will go down as one of the most productive times of Congress in history.”

“You wonder, how… when it’s so evenly split? Well, there’s no one to blame. We had to work together.”

Blunt agreed that bipartisanship and bridge-building were necessary.

“To get something done with one of our friends on the other side, you don’t have to agree with them on everything; You just have to agree with them on one thing,” he said.

“Don’t get caught into this visceral, this hatred,” Blunt added. “You don’t have to hate someone to disagree with them. Once you find a commonality, you can usually move forward.”

Decisions taken by what Blunt called “diverse and shallow” information may also be leading to a lack of civil discussion and what he called “huge societal problems.”

“Everybody has found their own — and very narrow — view of what’s going on,” he said. “We’re in a moment now when we have a hard time agreeing on the facts, and it’s incredibly hard to reach a conclusion if you can’t agree to the facts.”

Manchin reflected that what is being lost is “the art of politics rather than the science of politics” and finding “the best solution possible rather than the best possible solution.”

“Everybody has something to offer to the system,” he said. “You own it; How do you take care of things you own? We’re losing that.”

He said he enjoyed working with men like Isakson and Blunt because “I couldn’t tell if they were Democrats or Republicans. They just wanted to get something done.”