Does news that Joe Manchin of West Virginia is going to run for re-election mean there’s hope yet for the Senate? I, for one, would certainly like to think so.
Manchin is a member of my favorite endangered specie — conservative Democrats. Given the collapse of bipartisanship in Washington, he had been on the fence about whether to run.
Just the other day, according to The New York Times, Manchin was grousing to Chuck Schumer about the state of the Senate. “This place sucks,” is the way Manchin put it. After the Democrats blinked on the budget, though, the Mountain State moderate seemed to sense opportunity. He says he’s personally going to file his re-election papers on Friday.
It may be that Manchin sniffs victory for the Democrats in November. Or that the budget battle gave him a glimpse of the chance for moderate leadership while still in the minority.
Or maybe he’s read the new biography of Arthur Vandenberg. He was a Republican from Michigan who served in the Senate between 1928 and 1947 — called the “man in the middle of the American century.”
The new biography is a reminder, in this age of polarized politics, of how a principled centrist can emerge in a commanding position. Particularly if he’s willing to cross the political aisle.
At an event this week in New York (hosted by my wife) the author, Hendrik Meijer, marked Vandenberg as a model for a crisis like ours. Vandenberg’s hero was Alexander Hamilton. The Michigander liked Hamilton’s penchant for neutrality and protectionism — and what Vandenberg called “his unhyphenated attachment to ‘America First.’ ”
Early strains of Trumpism, one could say. Twitter hadn’t been invented when Vandenberg rose to fame; he used the editorials in the Grand Rapids Herald, of which he was publisher.
Banging on an Underwood typewriter, Vandenberg campaigned against the League of Nations. His editorials helped defeat — mercifully — that scheme for world government.
Vandenberg entered the Senate in 1928. He fought the New Deal, helped block FDR from packing the Supreme Court and sought to maintain the neutrality laws that outlawed helping Europe.
Once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Vandenberg made one of the most famous U-turns in political history. He helped create the bipartisan foreign policy that led to our victory in World War II.
In 1945, Vandenberg formally announced his conversion to internationalism. When the GOP gained control of the Senate in 1947, he became Foreign Relations chairman.
Vandenberg then backed the Truman Doctrine to contain Communism, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and swung behind NATO. Vandenberg was probably the first to declare that partisan politics stopped at the water’s edge.
What might Vandenberg, who died in 1951, tell centrist Democrats about how to break through the partisan polarization? In the age of Trump, how might a bipartisan approach take shape?
The thing that strikes me about Vandenberg is that his patriotism dwarfed the lesser concerns. Not that he ever abandoned his free-market critique of the Democrats’ domestic program.
He thought strategically, though. His speech on his conversion to internationalism was long, detailed — and passionate. He burned his bridges to the isolationist right.
A pundit, Meijer notes, once proposed Vandenberg for “president of the world.” He goes on to suggest that “the qualities that defined him are again in demand.”
Yet it would be hard to argue — not that Meijer does so — that Manchin (or any other Democrat) has yet risen to the occasion. Too much complaining about the Senate itself, I’d say.
That’s not the legacy of Vandenberg. His legacy is the willingness to cross the aisle and admit that, on some issues, he was wrong. And to work with the opposing party.
For years when the White House reached out to Congress, the cry would go up. “Where is there a Vandenberg now?” If that’s the glory Manchin is aiming for, the least we can do is wish him luck.
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