Joe ‘Manchin Is Just Part Of The Problem’: ABC News Correspondent

After Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) effectively halted President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, the legacy media accused the senator of representing “plutocrats” over the poor, resurrecting a discredited and racist “myth,” and being “part of the problem” in Washington.

ABC News’ Terry Moran and his fellow panelists leveled those charges the day after Christmas on “This Week.” Moran said that Senator Manchin, whose concern that authorizing a multi-trillion-dollar spending plan would trigger inflation scuttled the Build Back Better act, had abandoned his state’s voters. Senator Manchin “does represent one of the poorest states in the Union. He seems to represent the plutocrats a lot,” said Moran. “Look, Manchin is just part of the problem.”

Moran’s attacks echoed those of democratic socialists in Congress, who have skewered the three-term West Virginia senator. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) shared a picture of herself glaring at Manchin and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) called Manchin “a white man” who “doesn’t care about black people; he doesn’t care about Latinos; he doesn’t care about immigrants; he doesn’t care about women; and he doesn’t care about the poor.”

But 53% of West Virginian voters, including 59% of registered independents, strongly oppose the Build Back Better act, according to a poll released this month by the Remington Research group. Nearly two-thirds of state voters (64%) “believe the BBB will make inflation worse,” the group found.

In this case, the West Virginian senator has his finger on the national pulse. “[A]ccording to public opinion polls, he represents the majority of American voters, including Democrats, Republicans, and Independents,” wrote Angela Rachidi, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A recent AEI study found that converting the Child Tax Credit into a monthly government handout would convince 1.5 million Americans to remove themselves from the labor force. Democrats “planned to transform [the CTC program] into another welfare program for non-workers — something only 28 percent of registered voters and 47 percent of registered Democrats supported in one poll.”

The effort to portray Manchin as an unfaithful Democrat runs aground of his voting record: Joe Manchin votes with President Joe Biden 97.4% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight — more frequently than Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) voted with President Donald Trump, whom the legacy media regularly touted as a loyal Republican.

President Joe Biden will attempt to jumpstart negotiations over the Build Back Better act in the new year, hoping that proves more successful in moving Senator Manchin, said ABC political director Rick Klein. “Clearly he didn’t like the pressure campaign that was mounted by the White House and others,” said Klein.

Since Manchin warned that instituting a social welfare state would increase welfare abuse, the ABC panel also accused the senator of “resurrecting the myth of the welfare queen, that Reagan-era trope used to argue against entitlements, implying that the poorest among us are inherently irresponsible and incapable of using government services for their intended purposes.” ABC News’ Averi Harper said that Manchin’s “glaring statement” had “outraged folks who heard it, and illustrates just how out of step Senator Manchin is with this current Democratic Party.”

Many outlets have attempted to downplay the reality of welfare abuse before the partial reform of welfare under President Bill Clinton in 1996. CNN’s John Blake asserted, “The Welfare Queen myth was a racist fable that reinforced some of the ugliest stereotypes about [b]lack and poor people.” But the Manhattan Institute summarized the successes of shifting welfare away from an open-ended, lifetime entitlement program:

The child poverty rate—the proportion of all U.S. children living in families below the poverty line—in 1993 was 29 percent, unchanged from 29 percent in 1967. By 2000, the rate had declined to 18 percent, subsequently falling to 17 percent in 2009 and climbing back to only 19 percent in 2012 despite the country’s close brush with worldwide depression. …

In 1994, there were 58 families on welfare for every 100 female-headed families. By 1998, this figure had fallen to 34; by 2008, it had fallen to 17.

Employment rates among never-married mothers rose less than 10 percentage points from 1980 to 1996 but jumped 15 points from 1996 to 1999.

As a result, the share of single mothers living below the poverty line has declined, even when including government cash benefits in income before welfare reform but excluding all government benefits today. In other words, the income from work, cash benefits, and other family members was enough to reduce poverty below pre-reform levels—without food stamps, refundable tax credits, or health care benefits.

Manchin is not the only politician in the “current Democratic Party” to have entertained concerns about welfare abuse. Blake noted that the same issue had been raised by President Joe Biden:

In 1988, when he was a US Senator, Biden wrote a column for a Delaware newspaper in which he argued that the welfare system had collapsed.

“We are all too

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases