Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense. By Joe Manchin. St. Martin’s Press. $32. Morgantown book tour stop: 5:30 p.m. Sept. 12; Milan Puskar Stadium Diversified Energy Terrace. Tickets sold out.
MORGANTOWN – West Virginians have long know Joe Manchin: who he is, what he stands for, how he operates.
But he took much of the rest of America by surprise when he rose to become one of the central figures in U.S. politics during the Biden administration. I talked with people from other states who were convinced Manchin’s public face was a facade, hiding some ulterior motive. I couldn’t persuade them otherwise, but I enjoyed hearing their views.
Now, Manchin tells his own story, and shares his vision for navigating and perhaps reuniting a highly polarized nation in his new book, “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense.” And he’s opening the national promotional tour for the book in Morgantown on Sept. 12, at Milan Puskar Stadium.
Manchin reveals his heart and his vision on his first page: “Dead center is where I’ve been my entire life. It’s where the real solutions lie. If we are ever going to tame the anger, bitterness, intolerance and tribalism that have come to define our broken political system, dead center is where we have to start.”
He continues: “This is my declaration of independence from the extremes on both sides, but it is more than that. I believe leadership in any arena is about understanding the art and science of collaboration and compromise, civility and respect, negotiation and solutions.”
He lists his 14 “rules of the road.” Such rules as: “Government should be your partner, not your provider”; “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”; and “You can always do better.”
Setting the framework by recounting his defiance against President Biden and his Democratic colleagues on Build Back Better, he proceeds roughly chronologically through his life and career.
But the book is not an autobiography or a memoir as such. Each chapter is built on one of his 14 rules – how he learned it and how it shapes his thoughts and actions.
He brought the values he learned from his family, his Farmington, Marion County, coal community and his short football career at WVU to his career in state and national politics: the state Legislature, secretary of state, governor and U.S. senator, his decision to leave the party and his brief consideration of a run for president.
“Work wasn’t just something we did,” he writes. “It was who we were. In Farmington, West Virginia, everyone worked and everyone helped. … That’s what gives people dignity – the knowledge that they are contributing and are part of something bigger than themselves. … To me, loyalty doesn’t extend to things and parties, but to people.”
Retail politics, he writes, is earning votes handshake to handshake, and retail government is serving everyone regardless of who they voted for.
West Virginia now is as polarized as the rest of the nation, but it wasn’t always that way. When I moved here from the already sharply divided Pacific Northwest in 1999, I met Democrats who would have been Republicans back in Oregon and Washington. People on both sides of the aisle shared the values Manchin describes in his book.
Some will recall that Manchin himself had been endorsed by West Virginians for Life and, for a time, held membership in ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council Council – a conservative think tank labeled by the left as right-wing extremist these days.
So it’s no wonder Manchin’s centrism has many scratching their heads these days.
The writing style is smooth and easy: you glide right along. If you’ve talked to Manchin you know his voice, and you can hear it here on the pages. And don’t expect a juicy tell-all. Manchin focuses on his values and how he’s applied them to his career.
The final chapter is called “Breaking Bread.” It discusses how America can move forward by pursuing what he mentioned on his first page: collaboration and compromise, civility and respect, negotiation and solutions. And gives a tiny glimpse of what he’s doing now with Americans Together, an organization founded by his eldest daughter, Heather Manchin.
Another famous Marion County native and longtime Manchin friend, Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban, provides the forward. He sums up the message of the book: “Joe’s been in the middle of some of the biggest decisions of our time, and he’s never flinched from doing what he thought was right. He never let the political winds change his compass. Joe stayed right there – dead center – grounded, unshaken and guided by common sense.”
