Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
> Manchun was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona
Sure. My point is both are preferable to a MAGA enabler. If you lose perspective and start aiming for perfection at the expense of the good enough, you lose power.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem with being fine not 'losing power' but without actually doing anything that your constituents need while facing an uncompromising opposition that is trying to destroy the way of life of your constituents is that you end up losing most of the battles while losing any active support. When people only vote for you because they are afraid of the opposition and not because they think you are going to help them, then your motivations are not in line with the people who voted for you, especially if you can't even provide an effective resistance against the opposition when they blatantly do illegal things.
At least with a MAGA enabler things can get bad enough that people might realize what they have to lose.
In a country as conservative as yours, if you're culturally in line with the 'coastal elites' (forgive my use of this term), you can't expect a stable majority by being uncompromising.
Because of Manchin and Sinema, the people broadly saw the Democratic Party as ineffective and unwilling to actually try to enact their policies.
This is a part (far from all, but a real part) of why they turned to someone who claimed to be willing to get things done—even if he had to break rules to do it.
I'm not going to say that I wish those seats had been filled by Republicans, instead, because I don't know how much worse that would have made things. It's very possible that we still would've gotten 2 Trump terms even so.
But I don't think it's fair to paint them as unquestionably better, when the second-order effects are real, and, while impossible to measure, potentially devastating.
That was always my impression of him. It was easy to feel like he was breaking ranks, but realistically he seemed to vote exactly how his electorate wanted him to.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.