Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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Given his proclivity to bounce between being in and out of President Joe Biden’s good graces, it can be hard to track whether Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is a darling or villain of the left. Late last week, Manchin appeared to venture back toward the right as he slammed Biden for making what critics characterized as a thinly-veiled threat toward the coal industry. 

Biden, speaking Friday at a communication company in Carlsbad, California, made one of his classic deviations from the point he was trying to make and wound up in Manchin’s crosshairs. 

During what was ostensibly a speech about the CHIPS and Science Act – the new law through which the U.S. is allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to the development of semiconductors – the president seemed to lose the plot. 

“Folks, it’s also now cheaper to generate electricity from wind and solar than it is from coal and oil,” Biden said. “Literally cheaper.  Not a joke.” 

Manchin found little humor in the statement that Biden made next. 

“I was in Massachusetts about a month ago on the site of the largest old coal plant in America,” Biden said. “Guess what?  It cost them too much money.  They can’t count.  No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant.  So it’s going to become a wind generation.”

After guaranteeing the transition from coal to wind would save the company in his example money, Biden concluded, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”

Manchin, who represents the state most associated with coal and has a long track record of favoring an energy plan that draws upon old and new sources, took less than 24 hours to spring into action. 

“President Biden’s comments are not only outrageous and divorced from reality, they ignore the severe economic pain the American people are feeling because of rising energy costs,” Manchin said in a statement. “Comments like these are the reason the American people are losing trust in President Biden and instead [believe] he does not understand the need to have an all-in energy policy that would keep our nation totally energy independent and secure. It seems his positions change depending on the audience and the politics of the day. Politicizing our nation’s energy policies would only bring higher prices and more pain for the American people.”

Biden and Manchin only recently were operating in harmony as Manchin gave the president’s Inflation Reduction Act the support it needed to become law and Biden agreed to include a Manchin fossil fuel development measure in the next government spending bill. 

Things change quickly in Washington, especially when elections are on the line. Manchin is still two years away from his reelection bid in West Virginia, but he is a light-blue Senator in a dark-red state, has experienced a drop in his numbers, and can ill afford to appear weak on energy. 

The Inflation Reduction Act contains immense spending on wind and solar energy and is all but guaranteed to have a negligible effect on inflation. It will be hard for Manchin to sell any part of that to his blue-collar base. 

Manchin finds himself in the precarious position of looking like the person who empowered Biden to launch an all-out assault on fossil fuels, even though such a conclusion would be mostly unfair. If anything, Manchin leveraged Biden’s need for a win on inflation reduction and forced the president to guarantee more oil exploration in the United States. 

“Let me be clear, this is something the President has never said to me,” Manchin said. “Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting. The President owes these incredible workers an immediate and public apology, and it is time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.”

Biden, too, is in a tough spot. Unless Democrats achieve a supermajority plus one in the Senate, a feat that is unlikely to occur, he will need Manchin’s help if he is to get anything through Congress. If Democrats are shellacked in the midterm, Biden will need to number Manchin among his allies to make an attempt to break through an almost certain legislative brick wall.  

But even if Manchin’s support is neither wanted nor needed at the White House, Biden also managed to threaten further economic hardship on the American middle class less than a week from Election Day. 

As such, it took little time for Biden’s subordinates to go into damage control. Saturday, in the wake of Manchin’s strongly-worded rebuke, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre released a lengthy statement in which she accused some nonspecific person of having misrepresented or at least misunderstood what Biden said. 

The statement was far from an apology – in fact, it was decidedly a non-apology – but there was a clear effort to mitigate. 

“The President’s remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense,” the statement read. “The President was commenting on a fact of economics and technology:  as it has been from its earliest days as an energy superpower, America is once again in the midst of an energy transition.”

Depending on how the midterm plays out Tuesday, Biden and Manchin might be destined to see their hot-cold relationship become far less necessary to maintain. 

Republicans are heavily favored to regain control of the House, which will set up a two-year gridlock on any Biden pet projects. Should the Senate also swing to the right, Manchin’s vote will carry far less importance and likely be inconsequential in terms of passing legislation.