Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Did Joe Manchin Just Shock Us All??" video.

  1.  @cariopuppetmaster  And people keep forgetting that he is to the left of every Republican in the Senate. Some people have no sense of strategy at all. No wonder we keep losing!
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  2. If you want to understand Manchin, I actually knew him at one point. I ran for WV House of Delegates in 2006 while he was governor, and even a year after the campaign was over, he recognized me by name and face. With that background, here is what you need to understand: with few exceptions, Manchin will go just as far to the left as he needs to go to defeat any primary challenge, and not an inch farther. There have been exceptions, but something has to stir him in order for that to happen. I can think of two (when he raised the state minimum wage, there was a lot of pressure there, so he got in front of it): after two coal mine explosions in the first two weeks of 2006, Manchin closed every mine in the state until full safety audits were completed and a mine safety bill was passed. It took three days. The other was after Sandy Hook where he pushed the background check bill. He lost his A rating from the NRA with that one, and I am sure that cost him in the general. Either appeal to his emotions or his calculations, but he can be moved.
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  3.  @lesleyedgley8371  Any time. Like it or not, people need to understand that if we want the majority, we have to work with people like Manchin, and he is not someone like Lieberman working out of spite, so we need to figure out how to do so.
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  4. No, he's in the pocket of King Coal.
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  5. There is nothing to be gained from Twitter.
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  6. My thought at the time of the Tanden nomination was that this was the sacrificial lamb. Every Administration since at least Poppy loses one (Poppy: Tower for Defense; Clinton: Baird and Wood for AG; W: Chavez for Labor; Obama: Richardson for Commerce and Daschle for HHS; Trump: Puzder for Labor). Biden knows that the left hates Tanden, and it seems like pretty much everyone else not named Clinton does, too, so this was a way to make it look like throwing a bone to the Clinton camp while getting revenge for them taking the sails out of Biden 2016. At first, I was mad about this one, but the more I thought about it, the more it serves a purpose.
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  7.  @cyberpunkalphamale  Oh, yes, that is so different. Taking spoils is a war crime.
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