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For the Review’s July 23 issue, Bryce Covert reads Dead Center, the unsettlingly titled memoir by former senator and former Democrat Joe Manchin. As Covert writes, the adamant centrist and underminer of his former party’s legislative efforts has written a similarly frustrating book:

It feels as if he’s speaking from an alternate universe, one where the structures of our political system aren’t being torn down and our neighbors aren’t being terrorized before our eyes by authoritarian violence. His book may have nothing to say about the very real dangers we face, but it is starkly revealing of the worldview that got us here.

And part of that worldview? An uncompromising insistence on compromising Democratic priorities:

Manchin sees power as something to be used as a last resort, if at all.… This, to him, is somehow unthinkable—that a party elected on commitments to increase the minimum wage and send out stimulus checks would use the authority voters had handed it to actually do those things.

Below, alongside Covert’s essay, we have collected five articles from our archive about a handful of the country’s more accomplished legislators.

Bryce Covert
Compromised Values

Joe Manchin’s memoir reveals that the West Virginian Senator worshipped “work” at the expense of supporting his party’s efforts to help working people.

Robert G. Kaiser
The Closed Mind of Mitch

“That McConnell became a prominent public figure because of his battles against limits on campaign spending is entirely apt. His career spans the era in which money has become the dominant force in our elections, and this suits him fine. Money is the most important ingredient in winning elections, McConnell decided after that first victory in Jefferson County. ‘Everything else is in second place,’ he said in a post-election interview.”

—November 10, 2016

Julia Reed
The Case of the Kissing Senator

“[Bob Packwood] kisses the babysitter while his wife waits in the car, and the Senate elevator operator every time he takes a ride, signaling his intentions, she tells the committee counsel, by cocking his head and saying ‘Kiss!’ before kissing her ‘mushily.’ When his dinner partner’s husband goes to the bathroom, he leans over and kisses her, and when he checks out of a motel he leans across the counter to kiss the clerk.”

—February 1, 1996

Nicholas Lemann
The Not So Great Dictator

“The urge to find a contemporary political message in Huey Long’s career should probably be resisted; he was pretty much on the mark when he told a group of reporters who asked how to categorize him, ‘Just say I’m sui generis.’ What was remarkable about him was the extraordinary political power he was able to amass for himself in the poor, backward Louisiana of the Depression.”

—May 28, 1992

Garrett Epps
The Discreet Charms of a Demagogue

“What the ‘plutocracy’ was for William Jennings Bryan, ‘communism’ was for Joseph McCarthy, and ‘bureaucrats’ were for George Wallace, the ‘liberal media’ is for Jesse Helms—a conspiratorial, monolithic, sinister power bloc strangling the hopes of ordinary people. Helms’s crusade against the ‘liberal media’ sometimes seems like an internal quarrel with successful colleagues.”

—May 7, 1987

Richard H. Rovere
The Untold Story of McCarthy’s Fall

“Pulling Joe McCarthy down was never a one-man job.”

—October 28, 1965

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