Ruin America? Joe Manchin is just getting started. | Will Bunch Newsletter

Did I mention that I hate sports? That’s OK, because this Tuesday there’s only one focus anyway: Getting to the polls in the Pennsylvania primary and special elections, if you are eligible to vote. Philly voters will be picking the city’s first non-comatose mayor in eight years. Suburban school elections could stop the book banners. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court could save your 2024 ballot. So vote in 2023!

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to get this newsletter weekly, because we’ll be here for all the winners and losers — even the biggest losers on the planet, the Philadelphia 76ers.

📮 Interestingly, my question about great 2020s’ pop musicians didn’t stir nearly as much passion around here as the debt ceiling (go figure). But you guys did vote for such diverse artists as Devon Gilfillian and Amos Lee (both from Philly), Jon Batiste, and Leon Bridges. “Jason Isbell is a phenomenal songwriter, singer, and guitarist,” wrote Donna Carlton. “His lyrics hit you right in the gut. He and his band, The 400 Unit, can rock with the best of them.” Yup, and I’ll add my own two cents: Margo Price, Adia Victoria, and Drive-By Truckers.

This week’s question: How do you handle a problem like the Philadelphia 76ers? Is firing coach Doc Rivers enough, or should they go as far as trading MVP-winner and playoff loser Joel Embiid? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

On TV’s remarkable Succession, the lines between real life and art are often blurred like a 19th-century impressionist painting. Sometimes it’s very deliberate — as with Sunday’s third-from-last-ever episode about an undecided presidential election, a dangerously right-wing Republican, and the role of a biased cable-news network that gave many viewers bad-acid flashbacks to the Election-Night trauma of 2016 or 2020.

One minor subplot (spoiler alert, but not much of one) was the all-too-predictable end of the vain and sometimes foolish presidential campaign of dim-bulb family heir Connor Roy, who blew $100 million of his inherited fortune on an ill-conceived third-party bid (slogan: “Enough Already!”) that struggled to climb to 1% in the polls and melted when the first 7 p.m. returns came in. “Alas, Kentucky,” he says to his new wife Willa. “Alas, vanity.”

I wonder if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was watching. He might have learned something — because in this center-right Democrat’s unreality show, life seems to be imitating art. It’s true that unlike Connor Roy, Manchin — a millionaire who owns a Maserati and a yacht — didn’t inherit his wealth. (He doesn’t really want you to know how he made it.) But he seems increasingly eager to spend at least $70 million of other people’s money on a 2024 independent White House campaign pretty much as vainglorious and foolhardy as the one concocted in the Succession writers’ room, and which would only run slightly better in Kentucky.

Alas, West Virginia. Alas, vanity.

Here is what is shaping up as a nightmare scenario for the American Experiment. Remember the 2016 race, when poll data showed that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were two of the most unpopular major party candidates ever to seek the Oval Office? Turns out that was just a coming attraction. Headed into 2024, core GOP voters just can’t quit Trump and his worldwide Retribution tour, even though a majority of U.S. voters still despise him. Yet the oldest president in American history, Joe Biden, is nearly as unpopular, with even a majority within his own party wistfully hoping for an alternative. His biggest appeal is that he’s not Trump.

The weakness of the two prohibitive favorites for their party’s 2024 nominations — highlighted by polls showing about one fifth of Democratic primary voters might back anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — seems like a brightly colored invitation for a third-party, independent candidate. Politics abhors such a vacuum, and poised to rush in is the self-proclaimed centrist group called No Labels, whose Democratic members in Congress have already thwarted some of Biden’s more progressive goals.

The No Labels folks — with a center-right agenda that caused The Intercept in 2018 to suggest that maybe the group should be labelled “Republican” — have tended to oppose a progressive platform (universal health care, free public college) and sought work requirements for social programs like food stamps, while supporting some tame moderate ideas like gun background checks or infrastructure spending. As critics have pointed out, No Labels, despite its branding, does take a side: pro-billionaire, backed by a rogues’ gallery of corporate CEOs. One of its biggest recent donors is Dallas real-estate mogul Harlan Crow, the sugar daddy of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (Just to keep the Succession analogy going, a No Labels-related PAC also received $500,000 from Logan Roy ... I mean, Rupert Murdoch.)

Despite the fact there’s much overlap between No Labels’ policies and Biden’s goals — including the infrastructure and semiconductor bills — the group has raised that whopping $70 million for the ambitious project to mount an independent, third-party campaign if both parties nominate “unacceptably divisive candidates.” The GOP? Check. But Biden, seriously? Democratic qualms about their standard bearer center on his age and, among young voters, that he’s not progressive enough. Only Fox News brainwashing victims think POTUS 46 is “divisive.”

But as Anton Chekhov would surely tell us, do not place $70 million on the table in the first act unless you plan to burn it, spectacularly, in Act Three. Never mind that America has never really come that close to electing a third-party president; even a popular ex-POTUS like Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off and a seeming zeitgeist-catcher in 1992′s Ross Perot won only 19%. The No Labels scheme isn’t even known yet to most voters and has virtually no popular support, yet its kamikaze momentum seems unstoppable.

And in Manchin, this political idea from heck seems to have found its perfect match.

The politics is perfect fit, for sure. Like No Labels, nominal Democrat Manchin can be occasionally OK (confirming Biden judges, surprisingly greenlighting a climate bill) but for the most part is more conservative than even his “centrist” reputation. And he keeps moving right. Just months after supporting that bill, he now says he will oppose any nominees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who back Biden’s “radical climate agenda.” He said this after returning from the key state of Iowa, where he called himself “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate.” (Read my earlier columns about Manchin’s corruption and destructive politics.)

He sure sounds like a presidential candidate, especially when he declared “everything is on the table.”

There are plenty of good reasons to run — not for America, but for Manchin. His Senate seat is up for re-election in 2024 and the odds are that Manchin — who’s watched West Virginia go from a place Bill Clinton won in 1996 to one of America’s reddest Republican states — would lose, especially if the GOP runs popular Gov. Jim Justice. That means his time as kingmaker of a divided Senate is running out.

On the other hand, this man who never says “no” to the Sunday talk shows would be in even greater demand as a presidential candidate, much as Perot was in 1992. The exposure won’t come close to putting him in the White House, but it could boost his salary as a rainmaker or a lobbyist starting in 2025.

But the other thing that a Manchin-No Labels campaign would accomplish would be electing Trump, the most “unacceptably divisive candidate” in American history. It’s true that the impact of third-party candidates is unpredictable; most experts believe, for example, that Perot took votes equally from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But the informed hunch is that a three-way race in 2024 would help Trump return to the White House.

Some of it is simple math: Nominally, there’d be two Democrats — a traditional one in Biden and a conservative one in Manchin — facing one Republican, likely to be Trump. What’s more, Manchin’s appeal isn’t his charisma — he has very little — but for folks who don’t really like Trump or Biden. With just two choices in 2020, those voters broke for Biden and gave him the margin of victory. Trump might be loathed by the majority, but he also has the most rabid base of supporters, which is critical in a multi-candidate race.

Here’s the reality: The billionaires funding No Labels would indeed love the all-but-impossible Manchin administration, but too many of them would also be perfectly OK with the 21st-century fascism of Trump 47, as long as that kept corporate taxes low and meant more pro-business judges. No one should fall for this Trojan horse of a presidential campaign. As Connor Roy himself might declare, “Enough Already!”

Question: Do you think it’ll be a high voting turnout for the mayor voting race? — Via Vernon Carter (@TrkTurner) on Twitter

Answer: Vernon, history tells us the answer will be “no.” In the last seriously contested mayoral primaries in 2015, just 27% of Philadelphia’s registered voters turned out. And frankly I wonder if the shockingly lethargic mayoralty of the man who won that election, Jim Kenney, has devalued the city’s top job in the eyes of some voters — even as the city faces significant challenges. And here’s a related problem: Philly — unlike most other big cities — has neither a runoff system nor the newer innovation of ranked-choice voting. This year’s tightly bunched field of contenders means the winner could get as little as 25% — producing a mayor that the vast majority of Philadelphians did not vote for. No matter who wins tonight, I will be surprised if the 2023 election does not inspire a movement for significant ballot reform.

In the Christian Gospel of Luke, Jesus is questioned by a lawyer who wants to know what it means to be a good neighbor. The Christian savior responds with what is known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It describes a traveler who is robbed, beaten, and left for dead at the side of the road. Two men of high standing, including a priest, walk right past him. But a Samaritan — people thought to be enemies of the Jews — stops to help the hapless victim, treating his wounds and transporting him to a nearby inn. The good neighbor, Jesus told the lawyer, was “he who showed mercy on him. Go and do likewise.”

It’s been a few decades since I attended Sunday school, so I went back and re-read this parable to see if I was missing the part of the story when the Good Samaritan grabs the traveler from behind, places him in a military-style chokehold and strangles him. If that sentence sounds absurd to you, then you are not a fan of politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or a consumer of right-wing media like the editorial page of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. All of them are taking part in what looks to be a coordinated campaign to portray Long Islander Daniel Penny, the 24-year-old ex-Marine whose Manhattan F-train chokehold killed a homeless and mentally ill Jordan Neely, as the “Subway Samaritan.”

“We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens,” DeSantis — apparently days from announcing a 2024 White House bid — tweeted after Penny was booked on second-degree manslaughter charges. “We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine … America’s got his back.” These attempts to recast Penny as an American hero have been quite successful, raising about $2 million — and counting — for the ex-Marine’s legal defense. This alternative universe isn’t just endorsing a nation of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands, but also creating a Minority Report-style Department of Pre-Crime, since Neely — loudly disrupting the subway car with pleas for food, water, and help — assaulted no one and seems to have committed no overt crime immediately prior to his death.

“This sends a clear message,” said the historian Thomas Zimmer, as cited in Heather Cox Richardson’s must-read daily newsletter. “It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to ‘fight back’ against anything and anyone associated with ‘the Left’ by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence — call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.” I agree, but I’m also aghast at the rank hypocrisy at this movement that appeals for the Christian fundamentalist vote while completely distorting the words of the Bible. Before he imposes his campaign on America, I would urge DeSantis to at least re-read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and then “go and do likewise.” Because slandering Jesus is not a good look.

“What was that sound? Nothing less than the stirrings of a whole different kind of revolution from the city that gave America the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights — a revolution aimed at finally undoing a draconian justice regime that had turned the Cradle of Liberty into a death-penalty capital and the poster child for mass incarceration.” That’s what I wrote on this exact date six years ago, in celebrating a landmark moment in modern Philly history: the election of a reform-minded district attorney in Larry Krasner. Will history rhyme on this May 16 for progressives with their mayoral candidate, Helen Gym? While you’re waiting for the answer, please read: “This wasn’t just a primary victory. This was a revolution.”