Evan Osnos writes:

Months ago, in the quiet, eagle-bedecked confines of his office on Capitol Hill, Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, sketched out a social-policy bill not unlike the Build Back Better proposal that he torpedoed on Sunday, in a rebuke to his party, his President, and millions of people in his state. It was still in the early blush of the Democrats’ control of Congress and the White House, and the Party was pursuing an all-in-one proposal that would bundle the repair of bridges and roads with expansions of child care and other social services. Dangling the appeal of his pivotal vote, Manchin encouraged the Biden Administration to split the bill into smaller parts. “I’m saying we can get an infrastructure deal—a traditional infrastructure deal,” he told me, in May. “Then we come back on human infrastructure and look at the needs.”

But Manchin’s definition of Americans’ “needs” was always the problem. Even after his party split the bills, and after it spent many torturous months wheedling and flattering and acceding to his cuts, Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will be indolent and dependent. All over West Virginia, he told me, businesses “can’t find workers. They won’t come back to work.” Dispensing with the euphemisms a few months later, he told reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”

The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive. To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.

If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month. [Continue reading…]