Joe Manchin Is Not, Repeat NOT, Running For The Democratic Nomination. Maybe, Allegedly.

We won't believe him until Kamala's hand comes off the Bible.

Joe Manchin will not be running for the Democratic nomination for president. Not that anybody fucking asked him.

Still, that was the report on Sunday night. The ink was barely dry on Joe Biden’s announcement that he was ending his re-election campaign before one of Manchin’s advisers was telling The Washington Post that the West Virginia thankfully-soon-to-be-former senator was considering throwing his hat in the ring for the nomination.

This was the complete opposite of what Manchin had said on Sunday morning, before Biden’s announcement, when he told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation”:

“No, this is a new generation, Margaret. We’ve got a lot of deep people on the bench to conserve, and they have proven their mettle by being in an executive position. Give them a chance to rise.”

Weird choice of words — we’ve got a lot of deep people on the bench to conserve? — but Manchin is 77 and also dumb as a handcart full of West Virginia coal, so we’ll cut him some slack. The important point is that he’s not running and, since he already announced he would not seek re-election to the Senate, our public square is almost free of his annoying hemming and hawing.

Then Biden made his big announcement, yadda yadda yadda, and hours later Donna Brazile went on ABC News.

Brazile, the former DNC chair, is still heavily involved in putting on next month’s convention. David Muir asked her if the convention would be contested, which is probably a formality all reporters will be asking over the next few weeks even though party support seems to be coalescing behind Harris very fast.

Brazile responded around the 5:50:30 mark:

“Well, I don’t know the candidates. I talked to Joe Manchin a little while ago, he wanted to inquire about the process. I had to remind him that in order to put his name in nomination, he has to sign a form that he’s a Democrat. He left the party a couple of months ago.”

That he did! Made a big show of registering as an independent too, in case God forbid someone might accuse him of still being useful to the party in any way.

Manchin’s adviser then told The Washington Post that Manchin was indeed thinking about re-registering as a Democrat so he could seek the nomination, comments that sent up a groan from Democrats all across social media.

So Monday morning, Manchin himself appeared on CNN to tell Kasie Hunt, good news! He’s not running for the nomination, he is “pursuing the process,” whatever in the name of all that is holy that is supposed to mean.

Here, we are not going to even bother to try and transcribe this word salad, you can all just watch the video yourselves and see if you can make any sense of it:

Got that? Hunt asked him if he was running for the nomination and Manchin responded with several minutes of Well let me put it this way, Kasie, people are not sure where they stand unless they see a process, Kamala could be the nominee but going through a process could be very enlightening but the party four years ago wanted somebody centrist and we don’t know where Kamala stands on some issues so I’m pushing the process forward because we need a process to capture the common sense middle and oh dear God shut up.

As best we can tell, Manchin is worried Harris might be too far to the left (ha ha ha) and he doesn’t want people to think this is going to be a coronation (it is) and he wants to make sure “the center has a voice.”

The center has had no shortage of voices for decades, but Joe Manchin has once again appointed himself the great guardian of the middle. Also he is a huge attention whore.

Later, on “Morning Joe,” Mika Brzezinski asked Manchin flat out, again, if he was going to run for the nomination, and this time he at least gave a seemingly straight answer. Of course he’s Joe Manchin, so the possibility that in 20 minutes he’ll say something wishy-washy implying the complete opposite should never be discounted:

“No, no, I’m not intending to run for any political office and I made that very clear, I’m retiring. But I like to be involved and I like to have a voice, and I think I speak for the majority of Americans who are in the middle like me, 51 percent of us are registered to participate and vote, but we’re independents.”

Being registered as an independent, as any close political observer knows, does not mean you are smack in the middle of the policy spectrum. You might be someone on the Left who always votes Democratic but simply does not like the idea of party affiliation. You might live in a state like we do where voters do not declare a party affiliation when they register to vote. Which Manchin might realize if he wasn’t such a self-absorbed jackhole.

Joe Manchin is off to retirement in less than six months and we will never have to think or talk about him ever again, hallelujah.

But if Schrodinger’s Candidate does decide to “pursue the process,” that means we have one last opportunity to humiliate Joe Manchin.

[Washington Post / YouTube / YouTube / YouTube]

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