JOE MANCHIN FOR . . . SERIOUSLY?

In what were surely entirely coincidental acts of spontaneous political combustion, the second week in June found Joe Manchin enthusiasts in at least 28 states starting "@statename4Manchin" Twitter accounts using the same profile and header photos and retweeting the same messages from the apparent mothership, "@DraftJoeManchin".

They apparently forgot or never saw my 2012 blog post that began this way.

"Some people believe Senator Joe Manchin will run for president someday. If he does, Manchin will almost certainly tout his term as West Virginia governor during which he cut taxes and balanced budgets in one of the most economically depressed states in the union. And, if Manchin’s candidacy gains traction, his opponents will respond.

"They’ll say, 'Joe, anyone can balance a budget if you’re willing to settle for the worst schools, the worst healthcare, and the worst infrastructure in the nation. West Virginia is the poorest, least educated, and unhealthiest state in America. Is that what we want for the country?'

"The accusation won’t be entirely fair. West Virginia isn’t the worst state in every category. In some, we rank as high as 47th or 48th. But, for political purposes, the claim will be true enough. West Virginians will be humiliated and Manchin’s candidacy will come to an ignominious end."

Since I evidently failed to make the point that Joe Manchin's record suggests he would be a bad candidate and an even worse president, let me try again. First, let's look at "pocketbook issues".

In recent weeks Kansas'Republican governor Sam Brownback has taken a pummeling in left-wing media for leading his state into a budget deficit crisis by cutting business and personal income taxes in the naive and now demonstrably misguided belief that the tax cuts would be self-financing. Brownback fell victim to the "supply side" fantasy that tax cuts will stimulate so much incremental economic activity that government revenues will actually increase despite lower rates.

But, media needn't have waited for a conservative Republican governor to impale his state on the cross of an ideological orthodoxy that's promoted variously by the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), The Weekly Standard, The CATO Institute, and other conservative and libertarian organs. Joe Manchin, as Governor, took West Virginia there years earlier . . . and with exactly the same result. In fact, West Virginia is still grappling with the deficits spawned by Manchin's corporate tax cuts, which this year caused the state to raid its rainy day fund, freeze hiring, and raise college tuitions in a place that already suffers from the lowest level of educational attainment and the highest level of delinquency on college student loans in the country.

Oh, and job growth? West Virginia has actually experienced a net job loss since Manchin's corporate tax cuts were enacted in 2007 -- this despite West Virginia being among the states experiencing a boom in natural gas production due to fracking.

That Manchin, a Democrat, should have blazed the trail for Republican economic orthodoxy shouldn't surprise anyone. He was after all ALEC's leading member in West Virginia and is at present the only Democrat in the United States Senate who is listed as a member on ALEC's web site. That fact points to another problem with which Manchin presents us -- he has apparently learned nothing from the failure of austerity economics in his home state.

For the last six years, as the nation's economy has doggedly crawled its way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Joe Manchin has been one of the leading voices for greater budgetary austerity and slashing government spending in pursuit of every conservative's putative silver bullet for fixing all economic problems -- balancing the federal budget.

Why Manchin and his allies believe in these policies is not entirely clear since every bit of empirical evidence since the crash in 2008 shows that, both in the United States and in Europe, wherever austerity measures have been enacted, they have crippled recovery and left nations such as the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal far behind the United States. Still, Joe Manchin can be found regularly shilling for the Bowles-Simpson budget plan whose most noteworthy features include deep cuts to the social safety net, including Social Security, and an arbitrary cap on federal government spending as a percent of GDP.

All of these measures are necessary we are told by Manchin and the plan's authors, former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton Administration Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, because without them inflation and interest rates will skyrocket bringing the economy to its knees. The problem is that those predictions were made four years ago and we have long since left behind the putative date of armageddon which Messrs. Manchin, Simpson, and Bowles assured us was nigh.

What makes Manchin's continued adherence to these policies, which have failed both in theory and in fact, doubly mysterious is that they would be truly awful for his home state. West Virginia residents are among the most dependent in the nation on federal programs for a large portion of their incomes. Meanwhile, the state's economy offers few jobs and those that exist pay wages that are almost 20% lower than the national average. Consequently, West Virginia would be among the states hardest hit by the spending cuts contained in Bowles-Simpson and would benefit less than nearly every other state from the plan's tax cuts. The combined effect would be a significant reductions in personal incomes and economic activity in the state.

In that regard, even Manchin's preferences for which taxes to cut and which to maintain are strange. A couple of years ago the nation was facing the the nearly simultaneous termination of the now famous Bush income tax cuts and the payroll tax holiday that had been implemented by the Obama administration in response to the economic crisis. As it happened, the the cessation of the Bush tax cuts and the sunsetting of the 3% reduction in payroll taxes would both have removed about $750 million a year from West Virginia's economy. But, while Joe Manchin supported extending the Bush tax cuts on the grounds that "you don't raise taxes during a recession", he opposed extending the payroll tax holiday, which benefitted far more West Virginia families, on the grounds that "we can't afford another dime of debt". The problem with Manchin's argument was that the extension of the Bush tax cuts actually increased the federal deficit by about 50% more than an extension of the payroll tax holiday would have.

That's why it's perfectly reasonable to ask of Manchin, should he ever run for president, why he preferred a plan that would have disproportionately benefitted the wealthiest of taxpayers, of which West Virginia has few, over one whose benefits would have been spread far more broadly and would have done less damage to his state and the federal budget.

Manchin's views on the environment are, if anything, even more worrying than his economic policies. When during his 2010 Senate race he famously ran a TV commercial in which he put a bullet through an effigy of the "Cap and Trade" bill that had been tacked to a tree, Manchin signaled two things. First, that he is one of the great proponents of the most powerful and enduring myth of West Virginia politics -- that in defending the coal industry he is defending the jobs and incomes of West Virginians. And second, that he is willing, when his funders call the tune, to become absolutely intransigent and unwilling to compromise.

Unfortunately for Manchin, the facts, with respect to both the economic value of the coal industry and the existence and likely impact of man-made global warming, are undermining his positions quickly and incontrovertibly. The data clearly show that:

-- The loss of coal mining jobs, which has been epidemic in West Virginia since the 1940's, has little if anything to do with environmental regulation.
-- In the last 60 years there has been no correlation between growth in coal production and growth in local commerce and jobs.
-- Increases in GDP, especially those stemming from increased coal and natural gas production, have not generated increases in jobs and income for West Virginians.
-- The health consequences of coal mining can be dire for local residents.

And then, of course, there are the global consequences of climate change, which is a subject that Joe Manchin, like most West Virginia politicians, studiously avoids discussing. He focuses instead on the "war on coal" and reflexively opposes all EPA policies that seek to stem water pollution, air pollution, and greenhouse gases even though his own constituents are among those who are most severely afflicted by these scourges.

These and other policy choices have allowed Manchin to portray himself as a maverick within the Democratic Party and, in this day of rabid partisanship, as a "moderate" who tries to make Washington work. In fact, Manchin and former Republican presidential candidate, John Huntsman, have branded the concept by forming the online group, No Labels, which describes itself as "a growing citizens’ movement of Democrats, Republicans and independents dedicated to promoting a new politics of problem solving".

This and other initiatives have helped Manchin forge a reputation for being politically astute, which is a bit peculiar considering his own electoral performance and that of the West Virginia Democratic Party, which he largely reshaped in his own image during his two terms as governor.

Both before and after becoming West Virginia's governor in 2004, Joe Manchin was a disciple of Bill Clinton and an enthusiastic practitioner of "triangulation" -- Clinton's strategy of co-opting his political opponents' more popular proposals by adopting them usually in a form modified just enough to allow Clinton to claim to have improved on the original idea while also trumpeting his bipartisanship.

The problem is that, in Manchin's hands, triangulation sometimes became a wholesale abandonment of principle and identity for West Virginia's Democratic Party. As a result, West Virginia, whose House of Delegates and state Senate have for decades been controlled by Democrats, turned sharply to the right on tax and budgetary policy during Manchin's tenure as governor virtually extinguishing any differences with Republicans and plunging the state into even deeper economic anemia than it had known previously.

Democrats have been rewarded in recent elections with declining majorities in both the house and senate, putting the party on the precipice of losing in the upcoming election one or both majorities that it has maintained since 1930. And, although Manchin has won by double digit margins in his last two elections, he has been opposed by a Republican, John Raese, who is an almost cartoonishly bad Tea Party dogmatist.

Raese distinguished himself by joining Texas governor Rick Perry in suggesting that Social Security is unconstitutional and spoke wistfully about the way capitalism was before it was corrupted by socialist policies such as the minimum wage, child labor laws, and worker safety laws. Raese's ideological handicaps were compounded by the fact that for all purposes other than getting elected to the US Senate he isn't even a West Virginian. He, his wife, and children live in Florida, an issue that became problematic when it was discovered that he took a tax deduction on his house in Florida that is available only to taxpayers whose primary residence is in that state. Raese finessed the issue by claiming that it was his wife and not himself who owned the house.

In summary, under Manchin's leadership West Virginia Democrats have nearly squandered decades-long majorities in state government. And he is yet to be tested at the ballot box by an opponent other than what boxing announcers would describe as a tomato can.

In politics, Joe Manchin has taken his party to the brink of disaster and, on policy, he has taken his constituents over the edge.

Draft Joe Manchin for president . . . seriously?