The Center That Wouldn’t Hold
Dead Center: Putting Country Over Party in a Time of Crisis, by Joe Manchin (St. Martin’s Press, 271 pp., $32)
College football hall of famer and West Virginia native Nick Saban opens Joe Manchin’s book like a coach before the Backyard Brawl. The lesson he imparts is simple: unity isn’t weakness, and compromise is how hard things actually get done. It’s a telling foreword. Manchin casts himself as the last technician of a fast-fading craft, the senator who can still count votes in a room full of brawlers and get the bridge repaired while everyone else is fighting over the ribbon-cutting. He then lays out “rules of the road” that sound like the benedictions of mid‑century civic life before we all began “bowling alone” – government as partner not provider; relationships are everything; if you can’t change your mind, you can’t change anything.
My read of Dead Center is both sympathetic and unsparing. Manchin is right about the need for a viable political center, yet the 78-year-old is also the wrong messenger for this late hour in the history of our republic. His book is a catalog of reforms one would want in a country that still had a broadly shared political culture. What he describes – measured budgets, committee regular order, long tables on a houseboat where enemies have to listen before they talk – is the stuff of obituaries for public life and the public men who ran it, not just-so fantasies for a utopian age of abundance. Across a decade and a half in Washington, Manchin’s generation of institutionalists – those born-on-second-base Boomers who inherited working political machines – presided over and even sped along their decline.
I should acknowledge a personal tie. Like Manchin, my father – Fayette County, Pennsylvania–born, West Virginia–raised – played football at WVU, captaining the freshman team in 1958, and starting at tackle as a sophomore in 1959 before injuries ended his career a season later (Manchin’s time on the gridiron concluded even sooner, before he played a single down for the freshman team). My old man grew up “so poor [he] couldn’t pay attention” and made something of himself anyway. Manchin’s childhood, by contrast, had the furniture store and the church hall and the thick web of a small town; he writes warmly about the altar and the casseroles, a civic homily in the key of postwar America. Both paths produced a stubborn belief in work, duty, and listening. Only one of those worlds – the hard one, the sad one – still exists, and it’s getting harder and sadder by the day.
The sharpest pages cover his time as governor. In Charleston, Manchin managed crises with a high degree of responsiveness. Sago and other mine disasters made him a safety reformer first and a partisan a distant second. Later, in Washington, he had the instincts of a county commissioner who knew exactly how much leverage he could wield. For example, he did not bolt when kayakers surrounded his houseboat in 2021 (he corrects anyone who calls it a yacht, though it’s certainly far nicer than the little skiff on which former Youngstown U.S. Rep. Jim Traficant resided when perpetual tax delinquencies greatly reduced Jimbo’s operating budget), banners reading no climate, no deal and don’t sink our healthcare flapping in the Potomac breeze. He went out in flip‑flops and tried to argue policy. Then, as he often does, he invited the protesters to his office. It is a story told to show his disposition: open door, fixed spine. It also captures the limits of the era. Where earlier versions of that scene might have ended in a deal, this one mostly produced interesting headlines for writers like me.
Manchin’s account of the 2021–22 legislative battles is the pivot point of the book. He admits he “regret[ted] capitulating on the American Rescue Plan,” a one‑time pass on party‑line spending he vowed not to repeat. From there, Build Back Better was an exercise in friction: his private written “contract” with U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer capping any reconciliation bill at $1.5 trillion; the House turning the bipartisan infrastructure bill into a hostage; and the White House communications shop issuing a statement that, in his telling, singled him out and “painted a target on my back.” When he finally told Bret Baier on Fox News Sunday that he was a “no,” it marked the end of a long, tiresome chain of meetings, leaks, and ultimatums. The book is valuable for its granular notes on that sequence and for its argument about what went wrong. If you want to pass big social policy in a 50–50 Senate, you do it with kindergarten arithmetic – counting wishy-washy senator’s votes on five fingers – not fireside chats or roaring orations from the bully pulpit.
He is equally detailed on the Inflation Reduction Act, which he casts not as a climate bill but as a national‑security package responding to Putin’s weaponization of energy. He says the administration sold it as the former, implemented it as an aspirational version of the latter, and left him to eat the political costs at home in West Virginia (he’s right, of course). That is Manchin at his best: the small-business auditor who can still tell the difference between appropriation and aspiration.
Then comes the institutional sermon. If every politician has a shrine, Manchin’s is to the filibuster, “the Holy Grail,” as he quotes the nigh-immortal West Virginia Senate leader Robert Byrd. He lays out the history – cloture in 1917, the 60‑vote threshold, the nuclear options of 2013 and 2017 – and makes a strong case for its preservation: without a minority veto, “the Senate becomes just another version of the House,” and we swing from one extreme to the other. He praises U.S. Se. Mitch McConnell for refusing to kill the legislative filibuster under Trump; he excoriates Schumer for trying to bury it in 2022; he refuses to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024 because he saw her as the person who would end it forever. The problem is that the much-reduced filibuster he defends no longer applies to presidential appointees and, to the extent that it’s used at all, functions mainly as a budget-stalling veto point for parties that have no reason to accept any shared facts, since none exist, and for a donor and media ecosystem that monetizes stalemate. Manchin never fully resolved that contradiction, nor could he have had he remained in office.
Manchin invokes Bill Clinton as the last major Democrat to govern from the center with a working Congress and broad trust in institutions. The comparison does Manchin no favors. Clinton’s “triangulation” required a media and party system with choke points and deal brokers. Manchin was operating in a shattered marketplace of attention where money, and social media have rewired incentives, rewarding performative purity and punishing compromise. He sees the disease clearly, highlighting insoluble boogeymen such as the Citizens United decision on corporate speech, dark money, algorithmic rage, yet insists the old treatments would still work if we’d only use them. While the civics lesson is admirable, the prognosis is naïve.
The personal passages keep the book from reading like a staff memo. The scenes of Almost Heaven – his 65‑foot steel trawler he insists is a “houseboat” despite it having a literal bridge you must cross to come aboard – are miniature civics rituals: equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, the late‑night carafes of bargain wine (“Cupcake,” aerated), and a rule about singing “God Bless the USA” before anyone leaves. Sometimes it worked. Tom Harkin stayed and talked with Ted Cruz and the ABLE Act followed, a modest but important win for disabled Americans. Usually it didn’t.
Manchin can be candid about misjudgments. The gun chapter, written in the long shadow of the Sandy Hook shooting and Alex Jones’ bogus claims of crisis actors, admits his Ginsu-sharp legislative instincts were wrong. “I didn’t know anyone who was hunting with an AK-47 or AR-15,” he writes by way of explanation for his vehemence on the issue, and he worked with former U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey on a background‑checks and gun show loophole compromise and took heat from both sides in spite of that. He describes the death threats, the “traitor” labels, and kept going anyway – only for the bill to fail 54-46 in the Senate. “We should have the courage to close loopholes in the system,” he insists, but it’s abundantly clear in a nation of at least 300 million private firearms that this kind of reform is a dead letter.
He is also candid about his party. The book explains his 2024 break with Democrats and his registration as an Independent not as a brand exercise but as a confession that the machines are failing. He flirted with a “No Labels”-labeled path to the presidency, then backed off when the structural barriers (ballot access, debates, spoiler logic) proved insurmountable, because of course they are. He floats a repair agenda involving campaign‑finance reform, a revival of committee power, a politics of “standing for something” that would require precisely the sort of bipartisan cooperation both parties now fundraise against. He closes by telling readers “the center still holds – if we’re willing to stand in it.” The sentence is well‑meant, but it undercuts his own narrative. If the center held, he would be riding out his octogenarian years in the Senate like the late Dianne Feinstein and an organizer-activist like Charlie Kirk likely wouldn’t have been felled by a politically-motivated assassin’s bullet.
What the book captures, inadvertently, is the tragedy of timing: Manchin stumbled onto the national stage just as the civil-society stagehands left. He has a Bill Clinton Democratic Leadership Council‑era tool kit, including face‑to‑face bargaining, incrementalism, faith in the dignity of Hart-and-Sacks legal process, without a Clinton‑era fin-de-siècle environment around him. Dead Center is most persuasive as a chronicle of that mismatch. He celebrates the 50–50 Senate for making the 117th Congress “one of the most productive in history,” and he’s right in a narrow sense. In a broader sense, even those wins were delivered under the shadow of extinction.
W.B. Yeats’s poetic warning is now the cliché of every editorial page, but it’s unavoidable here: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Manchin says otherwise, and he has earned the right to try. But look around: the argument for a functional middle has never sounded more poignant or more belated. The aftershocks of the Charlie Kirk assassination – instant and well-deserved factional blame, hardening talk of retribution and speech restrictions – depict a politics that can no longer afford to treat civic peace as a common good, only as a tactic to be deployed or withheld. The book tells us how to behave in a shared society, while the behavior of many people in this country reminds us, as Margaret Thatcher once shrewdly observed, that there’s no such thing as one.
Still, I don’t want to deny Manchin his due. There’s a reason activists on both sides have regarded the former WVU quarterback with exasperation and, grudgingly, respect: he’s a throwback who could still move a trillion dollars of concrete and fiber‑optic cable while telling the left no and the right not yet. He could also be vain, irritable, and wrong, especially about the capacity of process to correct for bad faith. That is the indisputable, and it is why the book lands as an end-of-empire tragedy rather than a Pax Americana hero’s journey. Manchin should have governed the national stage from the center when the center stage still had the spotlight on it. He arrived too well past what a crank like Milton “Bill” Cooper might call “the hour of the time,” and he couldn’t bring the old world with him.
The last pages return to that old-world Italian family of his. The chapter called “Breaking Bread” ends with a father’s maxim about saying no “with a tear in your eye.” It’s a sweet, humane standard and is also the best defense of Manchin’s politics. At his advanced age, he can’t redeem bipartisanship as any sort of ticket to the big time. At most, he can try to raise awareness of a set of habits, such as hearing, conceding, and refusing to humiliate temporarily vanquished foes, that once made civil society possible. Those common-sense habits, alas, are now in uncommonly short supply. To the extent that it can, his book preserves them in amber and passes off that museum curation as a bit of grandfatherly hope for what comes next. But the flint-eyed realist’s question, after assassinations in Minnesota and Utah, and wars and rumors of wars all around the world, isn’t what’s next for America. It is what’s left.
