During an interview aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) responded to a question on why people have a negative view of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy by stating that “messaging is the biggest problem” and that Biden and Democratic majorities in Congress got many positive things done.
Host Chris Cuomo asked, “Sen. Manchin will say to me, you bash Congress too much, Cuomo, we got more done in the 117th Congress than I’ve seen in a long time. And you have to give us our due. So, make the connection for me, Sen., what do you believe that got done that matters so much, especially for the Democrats’ message, and why do people have such a negative impression of the sitting President, President Biden, when it comes to getting things done in the economy?”
Manchin responded, “First of all, I think messaging is the biggest problem. If you’re not basically laying out what you’re trying to accomplish, and then when you do accomplish it, you succeed at something. So, first of all, let’s take January 6, that happened, Chris, it was for real. The insurrection was for real. I was here. As much as I would have liked to think they were coming to visit me and all the other senators and congresspeople, that wasn’t the case. We saw it live and personal. So, with that being said, we passed the Electoral Count Act to prevent that from ever happening or giving…the impetus for a group of people thinking we can stop this transfer of power, let’s just go grab the ballot box, let’s stop that, the counting of the — the official counting of the ballots. We’ve stopped that from happening. And we did it in a bipartisan way with about ten Democrats and ten Republicans working through a bunch of iterations of what we should do.”
He continued, “We’ve done an energy bill. We’d never done an energy bill for 30 years. We did that. And then we did — on top of that, we did the CHIPS Act. And basically, we were just the supply chain and what COVID showed us [was] that we were so reliant on foreign suppliers that [don’t] have our values. China doesn’t have our values. Russia doesn’t have our values. Iran doesn’t have our values, North Korea. So, Chris, what we’ve done is said, we’ve got to start bringing that production, the building blocks of America that we need every day to operate and maintain the superpower status that we have, that we’ve got to rely on ourselves and our best trading partners that we have that we’ve always relied on, our NATO allies, things of that sort. … And then we did the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And we all knew we had to do that.”
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